Pages

Saturday 26 March 2011

Procrastination from Dissertation

I am an extremely skilled procrastinator, and if there were such a thing as a degree in Procrastination I would have a PhD in it already. 

Today my to-do list looked like this: 


I woke up feeling motivated and ready to go. One item to tick off? Easy!

Actually, that’s a lie. Scratch that. 

I dragged myself out of bed and, obviously, needed breakfast. So I decided to make porridge, because it takes a long time to make. While waiting, I decided to check my emails in case I had an urgent one from Uni telling me dissertations were cancelled. If that happened and I hadn’t checked, my day would be wasted! I didn’t have any such email, but the naughty internet still sucked away an hour of my time. During this hour, I found a recipe for peanut butter cookies and it said they only took fifteen minutes to make! So I thought to myself, well, I can surely spare fifteen minutes to make these cookies, and then I will still have all day to do my dissertation, and I will also have nice home-made (because if it’s home-made it’s healthier and therefore counts as one of your five-a-day.) cookies to help me through the trauma of it.  

So I went and searched through my cupboard for the required ingredients, and found that I didn’t have enough sugar; I would have to go to the supermarket. Problem: I was still in my pyjamas.

Forty-five minutes later I was on my way to the supermarket (because straightening one’s hair and applying a full face of make-up is clearly essential in this situation. And that’s after the trying-on and discarding – on to the bedroom floor - of several different outfits). The supermarket is five minutes away, if that, from my flat but I somehow accidentally went there via Topshop (twenty minutes away in the opposite direction)  and then decided that since I was in Topshop I might as well try on some things I had no intention of buying. And then, once I had dragged myself out of Topshop I decided that since I was in town, I might as well have a look round some other shops. After a couple of hours of aimless wandering and lusting after clothes and shoes I can’t afford, I ended up buying a new cafetiere  (It’s purple and makes one cup of coffee and cost £15; I cannot afford to pay £15 for a one-cup cafetiere but did so anyway because it is absolutely essential to my life to have a purple cafetiere.) and Glamour magazine. 

Three hours later I finally arrived back at the flat and then, of course, had no choice but to read every single page of Glamour, including all the adverts (even all those crappy ones for plastic surgery and teeth whitening in the back few pages), which wasted another couple of hours. It was then I realised that I hadn’t bought sugar to make those fifteen-minute cookies with, and it being a good bit after lunch-time, I was hungry. 

Unfortunately, I’d made tapas last night, and had left-over Spanish omelette and patatas bravas to munch on, meaning no time could be wasted in preparing food. So I decided to watch a program on BBC iPlayer while I ate. It was, of course, extremely high-brow and made a lasting impression on me, so much so that I now have no remaining recollection of what I watched. Only that it was ninety minutes in length, by which point I was feeling rather sick due to over-consumption of potato. 

I still wanted to make those cookies, but now they had become something to procrastinate from doing, too. I decided to clean the fridge in order to have a clean environment in which to bake. Clean fridges are essential to baking. But on my way through to the kitchen I spotted the Census form sitting on the living room table and decided I’d better fill it in. It took a disappointingly short amount of time, so I phoned my mother. She was only mildly disgruntled that I was using her to procrastinate. That’s what mums are for. 

Then mum had to go and I realised there was now no escaping the dreaded dissertation. But somehow the TV went on. I don’t know how that happened, but it did. There was nothing really on worth watching, so I had to spend some time deciding which DVD out of four shelves-worth to watch. Deciding was a long process, involving organising them alphabetically and then by genre. I finally settled on The Last Kiss. Once it was over I came online to check something, but ended up creating this blog instead. 

Once I’ve posted this, I am going to do some dissertation. Although, as mum reminded me on the phone, we lose an hour tonight. So I should probably just go to bed early and get that hour of sleep I would otherwise miss. 

Tomorrow I will need to tidy away all those clothes I discarded on my bedroom floor, clean the fridge as promised, go to the gym after eating all that potato today, and then make a start on my dissertation.

And I never did make those cookies; so I should probably do that, or else how will I get through my dissertation without sustenance?!

2 comments:

  1. Very funny NOW GET ON WITH YOUR DISSERTATION! (or make cookies and call it getting on with your dessertation boom boom)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hahaha, this is superb. My dissertation was written in much the same way... Just don't, and I mean DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES start watching A Very Potter Musical on Youtube. Three hours of your life gone right there. And then there's the sequel... Gosh darn it, my dissertation could have been so much better...

    ReplyDelete