I’ve read that overcoming the temptation to procrastinate is like learning to brush your teeth. At 3 or 4 years we have so much trouble squeezing the paste on to the brush, balancing it there while we slowly take the brush to our mouths, only to fumble teeth strokes so that foam falls down our clothes and over our hands to the point we’ve hardly brushed our teeth at all. Watching a kid attempt the task is amusing, and shows us how easy it is to us now, and how we have forgotten how we learned to do it.

At the age of 36, after more than fifteen years in university study, I can brush my teeth in the dark, but I can’t sit in front of a computer and begin typing without thinking I’d rather be doing something else. So I grab a smoke, make a coffee, play Internet Checkers, check my email again, change the desktop image, open a new Word document, play with styles, yada yada yada.

This paper was a particularly painful one to write. Methodologies are boring. I wrote this paper with so many bad self-talk statements in my head, like “Who on earth would want to sit for ten minutes listening to me present this crap?” and “This entire conference paper could be summed up in the words “Like d’uh” … there’s nothing new here” and “How many pages of this do I have to write” and “Is it time for another coffee yet?”

Anyway, the only true remedy I’ve found to procrastination is cramming - waiting to the very very last minute before it’s due to furiously type without thinking and producing a piece of complete nonsense and think, well, I’ve submitted it now, no need to worry over things I can’t change, like quality.

It’s here, but don’t bother reading it, unless you like literary versions of stale deli meat.