Procrastination Is Not Your Friend

I’m just going to come right out and say it. Yesterday I set a very bad example for my teens.

Besides working full-time, raising my family and blogging, I am also a part-time college student. I am currently enrolled in a communications class about mass media law, ethics and history. At the beginning of the term our professor told us there would be a big research paper due at the end of October. So we had a lot of warning.

Back in late September we chose topics for our research paper (or let the professor chose a topic for us as the case may be). I was assigned Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his fireside chats. I was pretty excited because I’m a total presidential trivia nerd. So when I got home that day I ordered two books from Amazon on FDR and waited in anticipation for them to arrive.

The day they arrived I dug right in to one of them. Even though the book was a little more scholarly than gossipy (I prefer the later) I finished the book within a couple of days and moved on to the second one. The second one was a 800+ page book that started from the day FDR was born, gossiped about his love affairs, enemies and political accomplishments and ended with his death. It took me a little longer to finish that book, but I finished the book about two weeks ago.

And then I stopped.

That’s when the procrastination began. Our professor moved the due date out to November 4th so we would have “one more weekend” to work on it. I kept telling myself, “I’ll write it next weekend when I have more time.” Yeah, next weekend became “tomorrow night” which became “on Sunday” and then moved in to “Monday for sure.”

And that’s where I found myself last night. Research done. But no paper. And it was due in less than 12 hours.

So I did what every good college student does. I pulled an all-nighter. Only I’m not your average college student. I’m a tired woman in her thirties. I’m a girl who enjoys her sleep. I’m a gal who gets really cranky without at least a good 8 hours of shut-eye.

But it was too late to worry about all that. The research paper was due.

I actually worked pretty quickly. I started with an outline. Pulled out all my documentation. Read through my highlighted sections. And then got to work.

By 2am I was printing my paper. I’m not making any promises that it’s an ‘A’ paper, but it’s done.

Now I need to remember to use this as a lesson for the teens. Do you think, “Do as I say, not as I do?” will work? Yeah, I don’t think so either.