Inside the Last-Minute Mindset: “Why Do I Only Feel Motivated When a Deadline Is Looming?” (getpocket.com) Whenever I want to send myself into the throes of an existential crisis, I start to think about how much time I waste each year not doing the tasks on my to-do list . If I added it up, how many hours, days or possibly even weeks do I spend procrastinating , putting things off and thinking about all of my looming responsibilities without ever springing into action? And what, in some perfect parallel universe, could the dedicated, focused version of me have achieved with all that time? Trained for a marathon ? Finally finished Middlemarch ? Written a Middlemarch -sized novel of my own? My last-minute mindset is something I’m well aware of, and yet whenever I’m presented with a deadline, I follow the same pattern: put the work off for as long as humanly possible, then cram it all into a condensed, chaotic period of ’ productivity ’, whic...