Procrastination. It’s where you wait as long as humanly possible to accomplish something that you may have had days, weeks, or even months to accomplish. You might think that because finals week is approaching, you might be more eager to get homework done early so you can start studying for finals early. For myself, that’s not quite how it works.

I call myself a pro when it comes to procrastination; I like to see how far I can push it before I actually start scaring myself with the upcoming deadlines. I think about everything I have to do: homework to complete, quizzes to study for, papers to write, reports to agonize over, and tests to ace. I can have all of that due within one week’s time, and yet, I’ll still find time to watch a few seasons of Grey’s Anatomy or Friends without thinking about the hours and hours of work I’ll have to do.

For me, the procrastination gets worse with the older I get. I acknowledge the fact that I have an embarrassing amount of work to complete, but I will still put it off. I will still find something that I can do instead of writing a paper. The laundry will somehow need to be done. I’ll shop for my friend’s birthday that won’t be for three months. I’ll call my mom and talk to her for an hour and tell her I got all my work done. It’s always something.

It doesn’t help that I also get distracted extremely easily. If I know that I need to write a 10-paged paper, I will prepare myself. I’ll spend time cleaning my desk area, because suddenly I can’t work in a messy environment, even though I live in a messy environment on a daily basis. Once my desk area is clean, I’ll actually open my computer and open up a word document. I’ll go to a music-streaming website, and spend a few minutes choosing a station I want to listen to. After I go through a couple of different options, I’ll settle on a station and then maybe type a sentence or two for my paper. Maybe I’ll even knock out a paragraph. Suddenly, a song will come on that I don’t know, and I’ll go check out the name and artist of the song. If I don’t know the artist, I’ll go look up the artist on Google and somehow get lost in an endless loop of looking up things that I will never need to know. This usually takes about an hour or two out of the time I set for writing my paper, and by the end of the allotted time I gave myself, I’ll still have the single paragraph I wrote and think I did a great job.

However, I’ve realized it’s scary fast how quickly I can get something done when I know I only have little time to do it or when I know I’ve exhausted all my distractions. Usually, this happens around 10 p.m. the night before, when I know I need to get the certain something completed and need to not do anything but work.

I’m not proud to be a procrastinator, and as hard as I’ve tried to overcome it, it’s just who I am. I could know about something for months and think about it every second of every day, but I just won’t act on it until the very last second. I’ve learned to just embrace it, at this point in my life.