Crown me the queen of procrastination

I believe I am fully deserving of the honour. In the last three weeks I have done basically nothing productive at school. Seriously. Even this would be being optimistic.

I do however, currently have the cleanest email inbox, desktop, file directory and cubicle in my whole lab. I also inventoried and cleaned up the lab library, a job which, based on the number of crusty dust coated mystery items I found floating around back there among the journals and conference proceedings, has not been done for quite some time.

It only goes to show how desperate I am to not do my own work that I'm basically coming up with things to do so that I can not feel quite as guilty about the fact that my actual, definable progress since the beginning of may has been zero.

I should maybe explain here that I am a grad student. Finishing up the first year of a Master's program in computer science. Grad school is like heaven for procrastinators. It allows us to be "self-directed" which basically means we do nothing about 90% of the time, and then cram all the work we should've done in nice neat daily increments into a panicked frenzy the night before it's due. This is also basically how I got through my undergrad degrees, so I don't see why I should change now. Grad school, however, offers several new outlets for my skills, including "working from home", "demos" and "readings".

The freedom and ability to work from home is probably the best. And the worst. Today for instance, I decided to work from home, thinking, as I always do when I decide to work from home, that if removed from the friendly distractions of my lab I might actually do some work. Work that at this point, seriously needs to get done. Pretty soon my supervisor is going to have one of those days where he says "so, what have you been doing?" And I am going to have to stammer and say "well........I cleaned the library!" in that kind of perky, desperately cheerful tone that always indicates that the end is near.

So I tried to work from home today. Notice how the fact that not once have I actually accomplished anything on days when I work from home does not deter me from thinking that this time, this time will be different. I really did think it was going to happen. But then, I picked up this great book, Kitchen Confidential. Man, it's an awesome book, that guy is an unbelievable writer, really has a way of making characters and scenes jump right off the page at you.

Anyways, I completely intended to only read it for twenty minutes while I ate some lunch. I mean, I've read it before, so how involved could I get? Five hours later, and I just finished. The whole book. And now, of course, I have to go to my parents' house for dinner in twenty minutes, so there's no real point in starting in on work now....

I always deeply admire those people who actually sit down and their computer and do work. I always feel the need to check all three main email accounts compulsively every half hour, or to check out my favorite websites, just quickly, even though I know nothing will have changed since the last time I checked. Procrastination. It is my gift, my curse.

My motivation problems are also currently compounded by the fact that it's summer, dammit. I want to be sitting on a patio drinking margaritas, not working on my monitor tan. So I think my worse than usual levels of uselessness over the past three weeks have been a kind of passive-aggressive vacation, or something along those lines.

Oh crap, I just got an email. My supervisor will be in all day tomorrow. And he wants to meet. I'm screwed. Totally screwed. Better go stock up on caffeine and sugar now...it's going to be a long night.