Prioritizing.

Exams bring out the best and the worst in me, I find.
I also find that they do this to pretty much everyone else too, but since I'm me and not you, I'll share my experience. You can share yours. =P
I am one of those people who procrastinates like nothing else. It's a gift I have, and about as useful as a hairbrush is for a cucumber (if you got that reference...I love you. If you didn't, start watching VeggieTales. Also a great way to procrastinate)
Anyway, back on topic...I'm really good at putting off what I should be doing. And, from what I've witnessed, this is not a unique characteristic. I don't know what it is, but every time I have an assignment due or an exam to study for or anything remotely stressful that I don't want to think about...I don't. I do other things. Like tumblr, twitter, facebook, stumbleupon, bake, clean, iron, patch socks, make puppets, write letters, write blog posts, look up recipes, visit people, sort old papers, call my family, whatever. I live a decently busy life without all the extra junk, really: I work at least twenty hours a week, have school for at least fourteen, and spend (on average) about three and a half hours either on public transit or waiting for it. The rest of my time SHOULD be consumed by school work, but it isn't. Because I procrastinate.
So, why do I procrastinate? Or, perhaps more relevantly to you, why do YOU procrastinate?
Well, maybe the answers are tied together. Or maybe they aren't. But I have a few theories for myself, so you can judge away as to their general accuracy:
I think, for myself, my procrastination tendencies are tied up in the fact that I tied my self-worth together with my academic reputation for a significant portion of my life. In elementary school/junior high, my academic reputation was the area I gleaned a lot of my self-worth from. Doing well in school was my method for obtaining respect from my peers and authority figures, and I worked really hard to obtain that approval. Of course, as you get older, you don't get a gold star for getting good grades. You get scholarship money sometimes, and eventually, you get a degree. Unfortunately, that's never been a big incentive for me (it should be, I know. But it doesn't quite have the same draw.) So, I don't hand things in sometimes, or I'll be afraid to because I don't want to be a nameless face obtaining a grade that just isn't quite good enough. Horrible logic...I know. But it's true.
I also find that the more disorganized I feel, or the more stressed out I get, I just want to avoid the cause of my stress. Recently, my most common escape is playing this game on facebook called tetris. For those of you who don't know, the whole goal of the game is to fit the multicoloured, different-shaped blocks together to fill up a row and get them to disappear, and to not let the stack of blocks reach the top. It's hard to explain but just look it up...you'll figure it out.) Anyway, I think this game is my subconscious way of trying to organize all the chaos in my life into neat, orderly block-piles that I can get rid of.
Maybe the whole procrastination question isn't as mysterious as I thought. Or maybe I knew that all along and I just wanted to write this for the sake of doing something besides my project. Whatever the reason, these are my (attempted) reasons. On the plus side though, the stress really does force me to contemplate the direction I'm taking with my life, and forces me to question whether I really WANT this education and to do well in school.
The answer is yes. I do.
Which is why I'm going to work on my project, right now.

Peace out, girl scouts.