We’ve all been there… the clock is ticking and you can feel every bone in your body pulsating with anxiety. You have blown off and have completely forgotten about the assignment you were supposed to be working on the entire week…and now it all comes down to this!—The chances of you getting away with this are scott-free are not exactly high…but you NEED that assignment to sustain your grade.

Every second is crucial, and you begin your quick “outline” of what you’re going to write: you are throwing things up against a wall and hoping that they stick. I have many epic tales to tell about my misadventures of Procrastination—tales that I will now sheepishly tell.

My first tale takes place my sophomore year of high school. I remember it like it was yesterday: I was in AP World History and I needed to turn in an essay, at least 6 pages in length in order to get credit. I had exactly one night to do it. I stayed up all night to get it done. My bus that I had to take to get to school arrived at 6:15 a.m, and my parents were not home to bail me out if I missed it (plus if I remember correctly this was during Finals week).

Now of course, being the procrastinator that I was, I really “spaced” out the time that I worked. I got one or two pages done at about midnight and then I somehow wound up falling asleep. I woke up at 4 a.m. and resumed my work. In resuming my work…I managed to get the last 4 pages but not without some drama.

At 6:00 a.m. I had finally just about wrapped up everything…the only thing left was to print it out. Well as it turned out, my printer decided to betray me! Quickly, I dashed downstairs—desperately heaving my essay to my gmail to copy and paste onto Microsoft Word on my Mom’s computer. At 6:13 a.m. I had finally gotten all 6 pages printed, took a deep breath and then realized it was 6:14 a.m….it was then that I stuffed the essay into my backpack and then sprinted down the sidewalk towards the bus stop like a gazelle to reach the bus. I reached the bus at the nick of time—just BARELY reaching the bus in time for it to stop and for me to get on. Crisis averted.

The next tale I will tell takes place my Freshman year of College. It was for a COM101. It was for a project at the beginning of the semester that was supposed to be 3 pages in length and me being me I put it off until the last night. Now the twist here is that the assignment was due at midnight.

At about 9:00 p.m. I kind of?...Began working on it, but I really did was half of a page. This night I was incredibly drowsy…so drowsy that I awoke at 11:30 p.m.! And that’s when the magic happened…I fired off 3 pages of work in the blink of an eye, pausing for absolutely nothing and turned that assignment in on Moodle at 11:58 p.m. When the assignment got returned back to me, I had received an A and I could barely keep myself from cackling in class, bursting out laughing as soon I had left campus for my car.

Why do I tell these “heroic” tales do you ask? Because I believe that procrastination within reason serves a purpose. Do not get the wrong impression from me: what I did those times (and other times…) was straight up moronic. But surprisingly: some of the best work I have ever done was work that I flat-out procrastinated on! Sometimes all that work productivity gets buried under one time interval all at once, and sometimes no matter how hard you try not to procrastinate you can’t but fall into it because of such things as Writer’s Block.

Sometimes all it takes is one great idea or one detail you realized you missed to fire off some form of productivity in your brain, and many times a deadline has this way of forcing your brain to do that.

I am wary of assignments where the due dates are few and far in between because truthfully, I think many other students and teachers, as I have observed throughout my years in school, are highly skilled procrastinators.

That’s right: I just put “skilled” and “procrastinate” in the same sentence and the reason why I did that is that I believe that time management is a real valuable skill to have. Being able to properly calculate when you are most productive is a most valuable skill to have because when you are at a job you will often have to do many things at once.

For instance, in writing this article, I am procrastinating right now! Throughout this entire weekend I was unable to think of ANYTHING to write about! My brain was dead in the water! How ironic that an article about procrastination is all it took for my brain to start clicking again.

So to my fellow procrastinators: do not be ashamed of your procrastinating ways! Do not fall into the dangerous trap of procrastinating too much, but do realize there are going to be times when you feel as though you can’t think of anything. That’s when taking a break (or taking a nap like I accidentally did) can sometimes work for your benefit. Just don’t procrastinate too--