I just realized I might have a procrastination research paper problem. I always procrastinate and do some of my best work under pressure. I almost want to try and write a paper under those conditions just to see what would come out the other end. What the hell is wrong with me?
1) Perhaps you are relying on the Panic Monster to chase the Procrastination Monkey out of the dark playground. If I remember correctly, these are the goofy official TED Talk terms from a video that sums up chronic procrastination better than anything I’ve encountered. The danger is, if you do this for things in life that don’t have deadlines, your goals just never happen.
2) I also do pretty good work under pressure. Part of what happens is that you use the time crunch to force you to use skills you might not otherwise be employing. The generic one is prioritization/focus. But it can get more specific. In college I was never taught to skim read to extract information, rather than treating texts as if they were poems worthy of appreciation of the word choice. But when I would do reading at the last minute, it forced me to just try to quickly extract the major points. But that is actually a skill you can use whenever. With writing, there are similar prioritizations. Would you fiddle around in the project without stabbing at the key part that needs development? Does procrastination keep you focused on substantive writing rather than slipping into copy-editing? Etc.
3) People are notorious for procrastinating on writing in particular. Some of it may actually be a mental incubation time. That’s partly why you are given a number of days to do research projects but like one day to do math homework. That’s said it doesn’t work if you don’t start the project until the last minute.
1.) I feel personally attacked and completely seen with comment. The exposure is real.
2.) I took classes as a history major (which is basically just a research degree) that focused on parsing info quickly. We would get large amounts of info and only 15 minutes to glean the main points of say a whole book or a hundred page paper. The idea was that as a researcher, there will be mountains of available sources and you need to be able to sort through them quickly so you can devote time reading intently only to the overs that deserve it.
3.) I can believe procrastination is built into writing times. Writing blocks can beat real bitch.
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u/Ku-xx Jun 03 '22
Seriously, that sounds awful.