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The Mother of All Excuses

May 7, 2002

"Do you procrastinate because you believe you work best under pressure?

 But what do you mean when you say you work best under pressure?  Do you mean that as you near a deadline, your adrenaline starts pumping, your energy soars, your efforts become more focused and effective, and feeling calm and confident - you do a good job, finishing on time

o At deadline time, do you feel stressed and pressured?  Frazzled and fragmented? Chaotic and crazy?
o Do you feel that you have 100 things to do and no time left in which to do them?
o Do you sometimes cry for help, enlisting family, friends, or coworkers to bail you out?
o Are you generating stress for everyone around you?  (If you're not certain, ask a few people if they feel like strangling you at deadline time.)
o As the deadline draws near, do you have headaches, stomachaches, backaches, foot aches, or other ailments?
o Do you sometimes miss the deadline?
o Are you crabby and cranky and irritable and mean and nasty under deadline pressures?

If you answer yes to one or more of these questions, you aren't really doing your best work under pressure (Emmett, 2000, pp.37-38)."

Reference:  Emmett, R. (2000).  The procrastinator's handbook: mastering the art of doing it now.  New York:  Walker and Company.

Do you use the "mother of all excuses?"

The Procrastinator's Handbook is available on loan from the Ohio State University Leadership Center.  A complete listing of all the Leadership Center's resources is available on our website http://leadershipcenter.osu.edu/

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Created: 2008-12-13, Updated: 2009-01-07