Nothing strikes anxiety into me like a deadline. I'm sure a lot of people are sympathetic to this feeling. I’ve never been able to plan my time well enough to allow myself enough time to finish an assignment, let alone do it well. Either I spend weeks planning the project, not starting until the very last minute, or I forego the planning and the pseudo-productive reaffirmation it gives me and, instead, waste time until it really truly is the very last minute.
I know I should probably learn from my mistakes and the nights of mental anguish trying desperately to meet a word count while also meeting my own standards. I would have no problem with being a procrastinator if I wasn’t also a perfectionist.
If I were only a procrastinator, I'd imagine that the stress of meeting a deadline would weigh lighter on my conscious. I'd be able to whip through assignments, reply to emails shallowly, and respond to prompts just well enough to answer the question, but only scraping the surface of deeper meaning. Being a perfectionist complicates this breeze-easy process. It forces me to slow down even as time runs close, pouring over the content of one sentence, agonizing over word choice, deleting and retyping the same sentence over and over again until I'm satisfied.
My mind is racing against the clock but my fingers are slow to write, slow to type, as if unwilling to put down a single word they haven't inspected carefully yet. Sometimes the procrastinator wins, and what began as a well thought out paper with ambitious goals degenerates into incoherent rambling, completed with a cockeyed conclusion. Sometimes the perfectionist wins, and I sit idly by, thumbing through my mental thesaurus, hyper-aware that I've missed the deadline but refusing to turn in work I'm not decently proud of.
It's mentally exhausting, like my mind is a train five minutes behind schedule and yet inching laboriously along the track, as if slowing down for the passengers to admire the country scenery. Even as I write this now, I am rushing to meet a deadline. I've clicked away from this tab three times to check Facebook, to check the news, to check an inbox that I know is empty. I've opened a few Wikipedia tabs, mindlessly reading articles about things I care very little about. Did you know Wikipedia has a whole article containing only links to other unusual articles? Like, for example, a list of the worlds breast-shaped hills? Or a lovely article about a forest swastika planted in Germany that went unnoticed for nearly sixty years? Nothing will stretch your mind with useless information more than a deadline.
I hope that by this point you understand what I've been going through. Maybe you've experienced it yourself. And we've heard all the usual advice. "You just have to manage your time better! Cut off the internet! Turn off your phone! Start a bullet journal! Listen to lofi hip-hop beats to drown out distractions!" I've tried them all. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. Because writing is hard. It really is. Ask any author what it's like to sit down and begin a novel. Even with all the time in the world, even with pages of notes sitting on your right-hand side, writing feels like transplant surgery, like cutting off a piece of the heart or brain and pressing it onto the page. It takes a lot of effort to write, and even more to write something you actually like.
For me, it's because I distrust the process. My perfectionism cringes at the start of every project, recoils in distaste in the middle because the product isn't perfect yet. I shudder at the phrase "work in progress," which seems to me like unfinished business, like eternal production hell. But if you never start, you'll never reach a point where you're satisfied with the work. You'll just keep hovering around the proverbial fruit tree, eyeing the apples, afraid that your hand might shake if you reach out to pick the apple, or that the first apple you choose will have bruises. Your hand will shake. Your apple will be bruised. But you'll never have any harvest unless you reach out first.
If this sounds like you, here's my advice, from one procrastinator to another: start as early as you can. Start the whole mind-bogglingly inefficient process from the moment you sense the deadline on your radar. You'll go through the same familiar motions: a slow start, tons of hours wasted browsing the list of animals with fraudulent diplomas, a sentence written every five minutes. Soon, though, you'll find a rhythm, and the words will flow easy. Even if you don't, and you go back to reading about the killer rabbit that threatened former President Jimmy Carter's fishing boat, at least you started something.
The procrastinator in me is easier to quell. The perfectionist in me needs to be reminded constantly of what Ernest Hemingway said about the process. "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." There's no such thing as bleeding perfectly. I'll give myself enough time, and I'll find meaning in the marrow.
