Yesterday I spent an entire day, from the moment I woke up (roughly 10 AM) until I gave up and went to bed (3 AM) avoiding work on my Moot Court Brief. This work involved editing it from second draft to final draft status, based on a relatively small number of stylistic comments from my editor. This morning I woke up and, before I showered, before I ate breakfast, before I even dressed, I clenched my teeth and got to work on it. I HAD to get it done before I was to meet with my partner to put everything together this afternoon.
I just finished. Editing it took 45 minutes.
I spent 17 hours yesterday avoiding 45 minutes of work. I spent more time writing about Star Control 2 than I did polishing my argument on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
There is a Calvin and Hobbes strip that wholely embodies my work philosophy. I should dig it out of my collection and scan it or something. The gist of it is that Calvin has to do some homework assignment, and he's playing instead. Hobbes asks why he isn't working, and Calvin replies that he has to be in the right frame of mind, "Last-minute panic."
I find this broadly true for me. I absolutely cannot bring myself to work on some assignment until the last clear chance to actually get it done (that is, if an assignment will take 3 hours to do, it's very hard to get me to start working on it until late the night before it's due, and if necessary I will put it off until as late as 5 hours before the deadline). At the same time, years of this sort of nonsense have honed my ability to crank out some fairly high-quality work at the last minute. In a sense, this is enabling my procrastination; other than the torment of the Dead Day Paper Writing Kabuki Dance, there really haven't been any consequences for my lingering ways. Yet.
