Procrastination Station

Anyone who knows me (or any Burch for that matter), knows that I am one hell of a procrastinator! When up against a deadline, I typically do my best to delay meeting that deadline until the last possible opportunity.

Take this weekend, for example - third quarter report cards will be printed on Wednesday and sent home with students on Thursday. While I did commit the day to working on report cards and did make some progress toward completing them, I certainly found ways to distract myself from seeing the report cards through to true completion.

First of all, I put off any work on report cards until noon. I slept in, caught up on a little TV, hit the treadmill, and showered. In addition, I had to visit with all of my facebook friends and devote some time to improving my Bejeweled Blitz score.

After finally opening Webgrader, I put in a good hour of work on report cards until I lost interest and decided to get some grub. One Jimmy John's sub and an hour later, I logged back in to attempt to focus on some headway on those blasted report cards. In front of the TV and with immediate access to the world wide web on my new laptop, I was never graced with the focus that I needed to get the job done. Sure, I made some gains, but any true procrastinator knows the games that are played when putting off a task:

"I'll log in the students' math scores and then treat myself to a game of Bejeweled Blitz."

"After I score these writing samples, I DESERVE to check in on what's happening in local news and entertainment on onmilwaukee.com"

"I'm hungry."

"I'm thirsty."

"Poor Bailey. He looks bored. I'll take a short break and play with him for just a little while."

"I wonder if the mail came yet?"

"I wonder what's being constructed at the Shoppes at Fox River? I hope it's a Panera. Let me see if I can find some information on the internet."

"I hate report cards. Why should I have to spend my Saturday working on these? It's no fair!"

So, hours after I first opened Webgrader, my report cards are still not finished. All scores have been recorded, but comments have yet to be written. Now that Jim's home and tournament basketball is on, I need to be realistic: No more work shall be done on report cards tonight. It is Saturday night, after all. There's always tomorrow...