I didn’t learn this in school. I was a terrible procrastinator and wrote a lot of crash papers at the eleventh hour. As an English major with bookshelves groaning under the semester’s reading matter, I often had to write the papers on books I hadn’t read. Before the Internet, there was an art to that. I aced ‘em, too, and never cheated. Now, there’s a skill you can use in life. But I did sweat and suffer a lot, and I did not enjoy the misery I put myself through.
In those days, too, papers were typewritten, and this was even before Liquid Paper, never mind word processors. If you messed up a page, you had to retype it.
But about procrastination: I had to learn this lesson in the workplace. It didn’t take me long to understand that I didn’t enjoy either kind of pain: the pain of missing my deadlines or the pain of making them at the last minute. So I chose instead to avoid the pain.
In my profession (editing) I usually had big deliverables over weeks or months, and so it was a lot like handling the coursework for a semester.
I became extremely good at estimating how long a particular task would take. I knew when things were at a level where I could just go along and take tasks one by one and when there’d be a crunch and I’d have to juggle. That’s when I would lay out the hours needed for each job on a grid, working around meetings and major interruptions, allowing for some slack, and figure out exactly where I had to be on each one at the end of each day in order to make it. I’d know right away if I was falling behind. And I’d put in the extra time to get ahead before the last minute.
For me the key was keeping records that told me how long things did take so I could make good estimates of how long similar things would take.
I wish I had been that smart in school.