This is an Honest, Goodbye, School! (for now)

Hey, guys...guess what? I made it. It required me only sleeping about 5 hours in a 50+ hour period, and writing 28 pages of stuff between Tuesday and Wednesday, but I made it. And why do I always end up planning down to the very last minute to finish everything? You know what made it really hard? I planned down to the minute for how it would work out with a final yesterday morning at 7:00AM, a paper also due at the start of the final, and then (I thought) two more finals due at 5:00Pm the same day. Just to be sure that all those times were right, I checked the deadlines again the day before, only to find out that what I thought would be due at 5:00PM was due at 12:00PM. For a lot of people that's not a big deal, but for me, yesterday, yes, that would be a huge deal. I finished my paper at about 6am, did my last bit of studying until 7am, took my final, came straight home, finished up another final by 11:10AM, wrote my last paper running completely on fumes, and was finished by 12:15PM.

A couple of people were really excited for me, asking me right around 11:45AM if I was done yet, thinking that for most people that would be cutting close enough as it was, but at that point I still had another 3 pages to write. And I know you're thinking, wow, he must really turn out crap if it's all that last minute, and he must not be doing that well. Here's the crazy part...

My grades have always been really good. About 3 weeks ago, I did a similar thing for my MBA course. I had a whole book to read, and a 7-page paper to write, that would be graded competitively against 40 or so other MBA students, and I had about 24 hours to do it. I thought my product was okay, and then I got my grade back for the paper: 95/100. Professor thought it was great. And thus, continues my reinforcement history of procrastination and staving off responsibility until the very last possible second.

When I was telling another friend, a fellow procrastinator, about everything that I had to do still, she just laughed and told me to go ahead and wait until the last possible minute anyway. It's more time efficient, she said, to just put it off until then. It's just kinda weird that she's right. Yeah, there is a lot of worry up until the deadline is done and the product has been submitted, but I manage to do a lot of other fun things in the meantime (albeit, with some level of worry and anxiousness in the back of my mind about what I'm putting off), and in what takes hours or days or whatever for other people, I churn out ridiculously fast.

If I were only doing coursework, then this method could work forever, but my thesis, and eventually my dissertation, just simply won't work doing it this way. That procrastinating is just a bad habit is not why I need to change; I have to change if I want to make it through my program and get through these huge projects.

Anyway, so that brings me to now: I am free. At least for the next week and a half or so. Most of next week will be spent basking in the warm California glory of my home, and part of this weekend will be spent in Zion. But, school's out for summer. This summer all I have is my thesis to really focus on, my golf game, my running, and probably my tan. I'm really excited about all of it, as you can imagine.

You know when my favorite moment is with finishing? It's always the morning after when I wake up without the benefit of an alarm (which, admittedly is how most of my days are anyway, but that's beside the point), and I look at my now-blank whiteboard, I jump online and read my news sources, and then I start blasting my music because I am all done and I have not a care in the world.