You know the feeling when you have something to do and you know that you should probably start doing it? Do you ever find that you have ended up doing everything aside from that thing you should have started doing hours earlier?

If you replied yes to either of those questions, you are in the same boat as me: a professional procrastinator.

To sum it up in a way that will make sense, I will refer to my procrastination as a project. I could know the due date of a project for weeks in advance and find a way to convince myself that I would start, no, I will start... later.

Somewhere between finding out about the project and handing it in, I find myself cramming all of the work into the shortest window of time I have left in availability. I often find myself doing different activities I want to accomplish that are lower in priority before what I should be doing.

Dishes in the sink? Washed. Laundry that doesn't necessarily need to be done right at this second? Already in the dryer. One more episode of Netflix? Already watched and counting down until the next one begins, so I could not possibly start now!

As much as I know that this is true of myself, the lengths that I can go to keep myself from doing what I should actually be doing has become absurd. The amount of unnecessary stress I cause myself in the process has driven me crazy. Some of my best work has stemmed from procrastination, but, as I have heard someone say, "new semester, new me."

Here are some things I have decided to do this year to fix it.

The time for jumbled priority lists swirling around in your head is over. Buy a notebook, find some paper, open a note on your phone and make a real list.

I have found making lists of all of the activities I have been putting off until the last second and prioritizing them all in one place has made me more reliable. I feel like I am staying on top of my own game. I set aside ten minutes to make a list, then set aside time to do a few things on the list and get the physical pleasure of checking things off.

It sounds so simple, but so many people aren't prioritizing and fall into the same black hole of procrastination as me.

When other people are involved in what I have been avoiding, I have communicated with them. Again, it sounds so simple, but communication to yourself and others is key to quit procrastinating.

I kept finding myself saying yes to things that I had no time for because of my infinite procrastination and saying yes anyway. On the other end, I found myself saying no to things every time I finally stopped procrastinating and decided to get it all done at once. All I had to do was say no or express my reasoning for putting off being with them.

Sometimes I even found that talking it through with people allowed me to create time for them and brought me to the realization that I was making something out of nothing and just procrastinating out of habit.

Finally, I stopped holding myself to an impossible standard that caused me to procrastinate in the first place. Nothing is going to go wrong if I do all those things I have been procrastinating. Nobody else is one hundred percent ahead of everything they have to do, so why should I have to be?

Trying to quit procrastinating is a step in the right direction, but perfect results do not have to come from it either way.

And hey, even if I fall back to procrastination, I am no worse off than before because I tried and I can always make a new list and try again tomorrow.

So, I cannot say with certainty that my reign as the Queen of Procrastination is over, but I can say that I am giving it my very best shot. I am hopeful that my newly acquired list-making abilities, power of simple communication, and dropping of the impossible standards of perfection will help me continue my journey to the end of procrastination and maybe helped someone out there, too!