I'll Think of a Title Tomorrow...

So it's three in the morning and you have a project due tomorrow for school or work. You've had plenty of time to be done by now, but something has kept you from sitting down and starting until this very last moment. It's likely that this isn't the first or even tenth time you've been in this situation. You are a procrastinator, and the sooner you accept it, the better off you'll be. Don't get too upset though. As a procrastinator, you have joined the esteemed ranks of elite minds like Renaissance inventor and artist Leonardo Da Vinci, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and author Douglas Adams. These men, and many like them, have changed the world with their amazing intellect despite an incredible aversion to deadlines.

Da Vinci's genius was only matched by his distractibility. He worked on the Mona Lisa for twenty years. The Last Supper might have never been finished if the patron hadn't threatened to cut off all funding. When he died, Da Vinci left thousands of pages of ideas that never came to fruition. Da Vinci's problem wasn't that he avoided work, he just couldn't choose one project to finish over another. Written in many places in his notes was the plea, “Tell me if anything ever was done. Tell me if anything was done.” Had he been born this century, he would likely have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and zombified with any number of trendy prescription drugs.

Eighteenth century poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was an impulsive man. He was ruled by his passionate nature; it's unfortunate that later in life he was frequently most passionate about opium. His dependency became so bad that he was using as much as two quarts of laudanum a week. The lure of his addiction pulled him from his work on many occasions, as a result a majority of his writings were never completed. Coleridge claimed that his poem, Kubla Khan was based on an opium dream that was interrupted because a "Person from Porlock" came along .

Many scholars and writers have suspected that Coleridge's visitor never actually existed. This “Person from Porlock” has become the most famous excuse in all literature. The caller, whether he existed or not, made up for ruining Kubla Khan by inspiring several poets and authors since then. English poet Stevie Smith wrote a piece titled Thoughts about the Person from Porlock, where she made it obvious that she didn't believe the story and fantasized that such a fictional person would come by and interrupt her own work.

Douglas Adams was described as a legendary procrastinator. M.J. Simpson, author of Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams took note of Adams' inability to finish a project saying, “Douglas was great at beginnings. He was pretty good at middles. He couldn't do endings... mainly because by the time he got to the middle, he'd thought of another really good beginning and he wanted to go write that instead of doing the ending..." Adams' hated writing, and would find any excuse possible to avoid it. He managed to write nine books despite his aversion, though many times his editor had to lock him in a room with little more than a desk and writing supplies in order to get results. Unfortunately, Adams' procrastination denied the world a tenth book, The Salmon of Doubt. Over ten years, he promised delivery of the book, but died before even finishing a first draft.

Whether, you feel overwhelmed by the number of projects unfinished, feel driven to do something else, or just hate the thought of doing certain tasks; some of the greatest minds of all time suffered under the same burden of procrastination. Remember that you are fighting yourself, your aversion, your lack of discipline. The great procrastinators' personal demons came from within as well. Their exceptional minds produced near-insurmountable obstacles, but they succeeded anyway. Don't let your fear of failure (or success for some), laziness, anger, or perfectionism keep you from achieving your full potential. Learn to cope with your aversions, giving up will condemn you to live a life of mediocrity and obscurity. Nobody ever achieved greatness by giving in to the temptations of procrastination. You have to make a conscious decision to achieve your goals in a timely manner, then fight the urge to become distracted. You'll probably always be tempted to succumb to instant gratification, but if you want to accomplish your goals, you'll buckle down and finish your work before it's too late.