I’m a Procrastinator

I’d love to know why I feel the need to wait until the last minute to write my previously scheduled articles. When I schedule an article for Panels on Pages, it’s usually really early in advance, at least a week out. And yet I still wait until the last minute to do the work.

I think about my articles a lot. I’ll ponder them during dead times at work. I’ll think about them in the car. I even once spoke my thoughts out loud about an article on the commute home and recorded the audio, never to be heard again. But I still wait until the last minute to put fingers to keys and do the actual writing.

Is it laziness? Should I just get off my butt and stop procrastinating? Or is it the fact that I get a rush out of having to hurry up to get something done? I kind of like the rush that I get from waiting until the last second. I see that the other writers at PoP! like to write in batches and release their articles one at a time, having an article scheduled by the beginning of the week. In the meantime, I’m up until 1:30 in the morning getting my images together and re-reading my final draft.

I have been listening to the Seth Godin audiobook Linchpin over and over again at work (it inspires me to kick ass all day), and I noticed something that I hadn’t before. It’s a section about the “lizard brain”, the amygdala, and the way that it works. It’s what gives us the rush when we know that we’re running late on something. It’s a primal part of ourselves that causes us to run on adrenaline when there’s a big deadline, and it’s easy to get hooked on that feeling. It’s also the part of the brain that makes procrastinating feel good. Yeah, I admit it, it feels awesome to procrastinate!

So now I say, BITE ME LIZARD BRAIN! No more! This next article I’m going to have done ahead of time. Maybe.