Procrastination- Ohh look shiny

Yo  Yo Yo!

Welcome to blog 6! Today this is going to be about procrastination, something of which I am a pretty good master.

So getting to it I’ll give you an example of how good I am. Mid-November 2012 I was set a title for a paper to write about for my course, which I have just managed to squeeze out in 4 hours due to it being due in the morning.  So what have you been doing in (roughly) the 100 days in the run up to the deadline, to which I can honestly say absolutely nothing. Ok I lie, I have been doing absolutely everything to avoid doing what I needed to do.

We have all been there, you get set something to do, practically years in advance, and keep putting it off until you hit Apocalypse Week, where the only comparable is that there is an impending zombie apocalypse, and only you are vaccinated to survive, you will get through it somehow but you have no clue how… anyway, you hit Monday, with the intention to at least start the work. Tuesday comes with the realisation that Monday was wasted, so you sit down to get it done. So you  open word (or any other word processing software) look at the title, and then go on a hunt for that perfect opening quote. You hit google and type a couple of words in to search, and SHAZAM! Up appears a link, which underneath it has those dreaded words….. Youtube.com. You click on it thinking you will have the willpower to come off it, but you don’t. You’re held in a zombie like trance, skipping from video to video, harlem shake to harlem shake, song to song, vlogger to vlogger, until finally you look at the time, 8pm…but you started looking at 1pm to get this work done!

Right you think I’m going to get food, so instead of the takeout that you normally grab when your in-between a busy day of social activities, you decide to cool the most complicated meal ever, every minute counts, pasta bake, roast dinner, anything that requires more than a microwave and a fork. So you get your food, bung your washing into the bowl got and eat, and then something amazing happens, you head back into the kitchen and do the washing up. Now don’t get me wrong I’m not untidy, but washing up gets done when your last plate is in the sink and the saucepan is looking a bit groggy to eat out of… again.

So you’ve done the washing up put it away head back to your room, sit down, and it begins. Its now 10:30, dark outside, and have a strange food mass in your stomach, which is making you extremely sleepy.  “Screw it” you think, and head to bed, you never EVER go to bed at 10:30, but for some reason it’s perfectly acceptable now…

Wednesday, its close enough to feel pressured, but not pressured enough to properly fret about it now… you still have 48 hours. Even at 50 words an hour you can make it, and you type a lot faster than that! So you get up, go for a shower, clean your teeth etc, to then realise “how dirty your bathroom actually is!”, so you spend the next hour cleaning your bathroom. Following this to walk back into your room, with this newly revitalised cleaning bug, you get a bag, throw out what needs binning, put away stuff that has lived on the floor for weeks, get a hoover out, polish, change your bed, do the washing, anything to make your little room as snazzy as your newly cleaned bathroom. 2pm comes and you decide to watch TV, Jeremy Kyle is on, you sit and veg out watching pretty pictures and finding every syllable that erupts from the mouth of the guests utterly enticing. You lavish and the petty arguments, the storming off the stage, at one point you catch yourself mid flow of shouting at the screen, the emotion pulls you in!

4:30pm. You realise that now you are being a tool and have to get some work done. You say hello to that blank word document again, glistening in its pure beauty. It’s so crisp, so pure, so untouched. You don’t want to ruin it but you type up the title, all 36 words of an essay which is 2,500 words (of which the title doesn’t count). You feel proud of this and start to look at books, you end up on facebook, posting statuses every 10 minutes winging about how hard you’re working, how much effort this is taking to complete, someone posts a link to a pig in a wheelchair called Chris P. Bacon. And you’re hooked, flitting yet again through youtube.

10pm. The title looks amazing, and your eyes are hurting, you’ll deal with this tomorrow, a good night’s sleep will solve it. You’ll get up tomorrow to do it.

Thursday. 9am. You set you alarm for this, you mean business! You roll outta bed bleary eyed and jump into the shower in hope for that it will be your saving grace. It kinda works, you get dressed and sit in front of your computer. You realise that your room is too noisy to work so you head into a campus building to get away from the noise. You sit down and get yourself ready, grab a coffee and a sandwich…. 11 am. Everything is sorted, you have everything that you need, “let’s do this you think”.. you type your first sentence, it’s pure fluid how it flows out of your mind onto the paper, 78 words. You’re proud of your efforts and feel that this is easily doable by 8pm. Your friend texts asking how it’s going, to which you reply “so so, come and see if you want”, your mate comes up to “study with you”, you know they are not here for that, and that you didn’t invite them to study.

You sit there, both with your laptops out to give the illusion out, but all you do is spend your time flitting between websites and talking to each other.

8pm. Your mate goes home and your left in the room alone, “I’m going home” you think, you pack up and head back to your flat. You get it, grab some oreo’s and sit down. You post a status about this “crazy mission” you are about to embark on pulling out an all nighter, “wish me luck” you type. 10pm, after replying to all the comments mocking your intellectual prowess you start to plough on, fingers ablaze you feel empowered with your capability to type. You stop occasionally to drink some redbull, check oreo stocks, and update Facebook.

4am, it’s done, no more work. I have bust a gut over this, I’ll polish it up in the morning.

Friday 9am. Deadline is today at 12. You wake up, get brekkie and have a shower. 10:30. You sit down and look through your work from last night. You realise that you amazing intellect has somewhat failed you, and the redbull you drank seems to be just as shit at keeping you “alert” as you were at typing. You may as well have just dragged your head across the keyboard and hit save. You do a quick fix on the work, its isn’t very good, but its got to that point nowhere “you have been working on this ALL WEEK, and just want to get it out of the way now!”

11:30. You go to print, the printer is bust, and so you spend the following 15 minutes running round campus looking for a working printer, any other week there’s 100s of the things churning out paper, but when you want one, none of them are working. You manage to find one, you have it printed, and its now 11:45, you’re half way across campus, and for some reason your university puts the hand in office at the furthest point away from you.

11:55, you hit the hand in office, the queue is huge. You cant understand why people have left it so late to hand in, “surely they are more organised than this” you think, not realising you are one of these people, but that doesn’t come into it, you should have priority because you have worked so hard on this essay.

11:59. Its handed in, you have nothing left to do. You have realised that you have worked so hard over the past week that you treat yourself to a night out and a couple of pints. You deserve it, you’re the boss!

It’s funny how it all pans out isn’t, and the sad thing is we can all identify with it, we promise ourselves “never again” but who are we kidding…. Roll on the next paper!

B