15 Things Chronic Procrastinators Will Understand

1. You start writing a piece about procrastination and then sit on it for about a month without a shred of conscious irony. (What? Just me?)

2. You manage to accomplish eight hours (hell, maybe even entire weeks) worth of work in about two hours… maybe less. You’re basically a super hero. Shrines should be erected in your honor. Peasants should bow at your feet. You should hear the lamenting of the women.   

3. You swear you’ll never put off another work project ever again as you stumble into the office with a stayed-up-all-night-working-on-something-I-should-have-done-last-week hangover… at least once a month.

4. You get the most house work done when you’ve brought a project home to work on. It’s suddenly super important that you clean out the fridge and scrub the grout from between the tiles in your bathroom at one in the morning.

5. You intimately understand the insanity that creeps in around 2am when you’ve had way too much caffeine and you’re home alone –AND OH MY GOD WHAT WAS THAT NOISE I’M GOING TO DIE.

6. A dark place inside of you whispers that you live for the rush of impending work related doom. That you feed off the stressful frenzy like a shark when blood is in the water. That you need the adrenaline rush to fuel your otherwise boring, middle class life. That maybe you like to live life on the edge.

7. Another part whispers that maybe you didn’t need to play Hearthstone all day at work secretly under your desk and that your research on the really stupid ways famous people have died probably wasn’t as vital as you felt it was at the time. 

8. Having a due date moved to the left is your personal version of the apocalypse. You have seriously considered breaking bones or setting fire to your cubical rather than having to admit you were not staying on top of your shit and you are totally unprepared for the sudden date shift.

9. If you’re a creative individual, you know, like me, you do most of your ‘creating’ (rambling?) when you’re totally supposed to be doing school work or work work or house work or a ton of other things that are more pressing but not nearly as fun as writing inane things for the internet.

10. You will procrastinate on paying your bills till the last second, especially if you have to actually go somewhere to pay or it requires more than a few clicks of the mouse. And forget it if you can’t remember your password. Paying things before a late fee is your own personal kind of accomplishment.  (If you’re in a relationship, you’re most likely not in charge of this particular facet of adult life.)

11. Preparing for an all-nighter is like preparing for a war. You got your high-octane fuel, your junk food (because this is the perfect excuse for Cheetos), your playlist created just for motivation, and at least three other things to distract you from what you’re supposed to be doing.

12. You tell at least three people (okay, and Facebook) you’re working an all-nighter just to sound important. Never mind that it could have totally been avoided if you had just, you know, worked on things earlier…at work.   

13. You’ve woken up (four times) with your face stuck to a notebook/keyboard/book, and if you’re extra special the Procrastination Gods may leave ink smears. Like war paint, so everyone can know of your great deeds and sacrifice.   

14. At some point in your scrambling, a feeling of profound, abiding dread will creep into the deepest recesses of your soul that whispers maybe, just maybe you put this off too long. That maybe you won’t get everything finished, that maybe this will be the time that everything falls apart and implodes in a fiery storm of I-totally-could-have-prevented this and everyone you ever loved will die because of you. This is the perfect moment to have an existential crisis about your utter insignificance in the universe and how nothing you do will ever matter and that everyone you love will probably let you down and maybe your parents never actually loved you at all…

15. You do finish it, however, and everyone seems pleased with your work and people cheer as you walk down the hall as skittles rain down from the sky and unicorns emerge from the break room to give you high fives and your boss hands you one of those big checks with a bonus on it… Or maybe you’re about to die of a caffeine overdose. Meh.  Either way, the cycle continues.