'Procrastination' is my Middle Name

At this precise moment on what appears to be a rather gray-looking Sunday afternoon - I have two pieces of work I need to be doing: (1) an essay on Irish immigrants in Britain circa. 1850-1945 and (2) my dissertation on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. I'm 400 words into the first and 5,500 into the second. So far today I have not really done much work on either despite my desk looking like this: 

My desk reeks of work being done, yet I admit that a maximum of two hours of solid work has been done today. I really need to have done five. One of the reasons why I have spent my day on the internet pissing about on Facebook and Wikipedia is that I generally do not work well at home. Music, television, the internet, even cleaning - well...especially cleaning are just a few of the things I get distracted by. I work best in the library, which annoyingly doesn't open until midday on a Sunday - and I ultimately waste the morning away anyway. 

Another reason why I don't work well at home is that I am genuinely intimidated by my desk. It has too many books on it. In my final year I made the effort to have a work-focused and quite minimal bedroom - however that has translated into 'lots of books and files'...literally everywhere! I am an organized person, but it makes me look a tad more obsessive than I actually am (which is borderline perfectionist/obsessive-compulsive). Despite this, my desk, filled with books intimidates the crap out of me and genuinely demotivates me from wanting to work.

These books are just from the library - only a portion of the material that I have for my dissertation. Instead of reading them like I should be I instead decided to make a pile of them on my floor and see if my dissertation material would topple over. I got halfway before realizing that I was wasting time.

I suppose that it's a good thing to know that I waste time - at least I have no one else to blame in the long-run when I'm in the library at 10pm the night before work is due. However, I do know that both of these pieces of work will ultimately be finished and turned in on time, and yet I never seem to know how. I definitely pretend that I'm working about 40% more of the time than I actually am. I think that to an extent if we say we're doing something we're not it might force us in the right direction. I'm hoping just by writing this that I might actually do a few good hours worth or work this evening.