The Art of Procrastination

Here I am on a Sunday afternoon, stressing about getting the final draft done of my memoir. I hate being in this place. I am not talking about my current geographic location--the Rochester Hills Public Library. I mean that I hate having something that I need to get done by a certain time and being in that particular zone of anxiety, stress, and fear of failure that always seems to accompany that brief span of time leading up to a deadline. Why do I always allow myself to get here? Why do I put myself here? Is it a lack of discipline? Is it a lack of time management? Or is it something else?

I am not going to make excuses, but I can say that I can come up with quite a lot of reasons why I didn't get working on this earlier in the week. I am married with two children, one of which isn't quite a year old, and I do work fulltime with an hour long commute each way to my place of employment. I can mention that I had family come to stay at my place these past few days. However, there have been plenty of times in my life when I didn't have all these responsibilities and I still found myself in the "procrastination zone."

I guess what I am suggesting is that perhaps some people work better under pressure than others. Maybe some people need the pressure to motivate them to get things done. I certainly hate how I feel when I am in the zone, but it seems that I do better getting done everything else that is expedient in my life first so that I can be free to bring all my powers to bear on the task that I need to get done by deadline. The feeling of relief I feel when making a deadline, perhaps, is my trophy for a completed task.

I hate pressure and stress, but historically I seem to pull through and get jobs done on time under the yoke of those two nasty, intangible motivators. At any rate, now that I got this blog done I can get on finishing my memoir.