Form 1040EZOMGWTF

If you are going to New York Comic Con, find booth 950 (Blind Ferret) and pick up some of my t-shirts while you’re there. After you pick them up, take them over to one of the nice gentlemen behind the table and exchange money for them. Then you can take them home!

I am a chronic procrastinator. It’s one of my character flaws that I have decided not to fight anymore. Life is quite short and I have plenty of other flaws that I stand a better chance of improving upon over the next 50 years or so. It’s good to let a few of the minor ones win so you can focus on the really self-destructive ones. I hear people say they “work best under pressure,” where as I “work ONLY under pressure.” If I have 6 months to complete a goal (at home, in business, internally, whatever), I will find no reason to act upon said goal until roughly 94% of my allotted time has expired. Somewhere around 70% time expiry, I begin feeling like shit and constantly chastising myself for NOT doing the thing I’m nearly out of time to do. Despite my self-berating, my lizard brain knows that I still have more time before things get super critical and refuses to let me act. Once I hit that final 6% of time remaning I go into hyper-stress mode where I continually talk about the thing I have to do, talk about how I’m NOT doing it and talk about how stressed out I am because of all the things I’m not doing. Then, usually the night before the thing is due, I do the thing. Then I feel good for maybe a day. Then I have a new thing to NOT do. And such is my mobius of frustration.

So it should come as no surprise that this is also how I handle my taxes. My CPA knows to file an extension every year, and I end up turning my raw data into him (data that takes me about 12 hours to collect, collate, categorize, etc… data that would take about 1 hour a month if I handled it all throughout the year instead of all at once) about a week before the IRS would send me to jail. I did it this way this year, and last year and every year before since I was technically self-employed. Get a paycheck from a faceless global corporation makes your taxes SO much easier. Then again, you can’t right off business movies, or business Twizzlers or business Twizzlers Pull’n Peel which are better than regular business Twizzlers and require a separate form entirely if you intend to report them to the IRS.

COMMENTERS: Are you a procrastinator, procrasturbator (someone who looks for things on the Ineternet to distract them from the work they’re supposed to be doing), or a get-up-and-goer? Anything particular thing/habbit/app/site/device that kills or aids your productivity?

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18 Comments

  1. I am also a chronic procrastinator, but unlike you I have only decided to put of fighting it for a little while.

    I'll get to it eventually…

  2. big time procrastinator. had many months to do my college final year project and did sweet fuck all until about a week before it was due. try doing 10000 frames of flash animation over 3 days. I looked like a refried zombie corpse at the end of that week. only ate toast and drank copious amounts of coffee. Bad times.

    Now I command machines for a living.

  3. That first big paragraph about your procrastination sounded so much like me, that I thought I was writing it myself as I read it.

  6. Business Twizzlers Pull N Peel should get you audited and/or on the No Fly list. Only nogoodniks prefer Pull N Peel, probably because it lets them reenact that time with the cat and lawn shears.

  7. I'm like you – I ONLY work under pressure. It's stressful and (I suspect) not entirely sustainable, but it's how all my best work gets done. I'm a senior in college, and I've never started a paper earlier than the night before. I once attempted this and got about half of it done in advance, only to completely trash it and start again with a new thesis at midnight the day it was due. I keep telling myself this approach absolutely will not work for the 30-page honors thesis I have to write, and yet the deadline continues to grow closer. We shall see, I suppose.

  8. I think you just need to pick a random subscriber (a.k.a. "Contest Winner") at the beginning of the year to continuously poke you with a stick each month until you do that 1 hour of prep work. Also, business stick is legitimately deductible. WIN-WIN

  11. Yeah… We're in the process of trying to get the taxes we should have filed three years ago done. I know NOTHING of what you speak… *Eyeroll*

    If your business is writing comics that comment on popular culture, your TV and Internet feeds should probably be written off as a business expense as well. We used to write off our satellite service back when Tech TV was a think, because we were in the computer repair business and it was relevant, but then G4 happened. Damn you, G4! Give me back my Leo LaPorte! And that guy who looked like Frodo who would tell you not to do stuff because it was totally illegal and then show you how to do it anyways. Kevin Rose. Yeah, him. That was awesome.

    Anyways. Guess I should get back to installing my printer so I can scan my tax paperwork in and get them sent off, eh? Before our house gets seized? Sheesh…

    • "your TV and Internet feeds should probably be written off as a business expense as well"

      Oh trust me. I do.

  15. Well… I guess I could say I'm a procrastinator since I'm reading this and on twitter, instead of doing my physics homework which is due in 20 minutes. Eh.

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