Time Management

I read The Important Habit of Just Starting and How to Beat Procrastination. I think that, for some people, these articles might be legitimately helpful, but they address a type of procrastinating that is fundamentally different than the way I procrastinate. I've always had trouble getting work done ahead of time- for example, freshman year, I had an 8 page term paper. I had three months to write this paper. I wrote it the night before it was due. But the problem wasn't that I had kept putting it off- I had scheduled time into my schedule every week to go to the library and work on it. Every week, I went to the library and tried to write, and every week, I read a bunch of articles from the journals we were supposed to be getting our research from- usually starting with articles that were relevant to my paper, but always getting distracted and reading things that had no relevance to my paper. I finally figured out that the library was the problem, and started working in places where I couldn't possibly get sucked into an article. But I could never manage to focus on the paper. I ended up having about half a page written when I sat down to write the rest of it the night before it was due (a very bad half a page, at that). I finished the paper that night, very easily, and I got 100% on it. This cycle repeats itself every term- I have a long paper to write, I try and try to get it done ahead of time, but I just can't focus on it until the night before it's due, when I "hyperfocus" (for lack of a better term) and finish the whole thing in a few hours. I know it's a problem, but every strategy I've tried to fix it is ineffective. I've tried joining study groups in my classes, which just results in me being more distracted during my writing time, and I've tried setting myself earlier deadlines, like "I have to have half the paper finished by March 4", which invariably results in one of three things- I write the first half of the paper the night of March 3, I write the entire paper the night of March 3, or my brain says "that's not really a due date", and I write the paper the night before it's actually due. Last term, I literally read two entire books and wrote a five page paper about them in one night. I had had the books for weeks, and I'd tried to read them every single day, but I could never focus right. So, that's my biggest time management challenge, I think, but in a way, I do have a time management method that works well for me- I've never gotten a grade that wasn't an A on one of my rushed papers. It's just a very stressful and bad method.

Editing: a step I rarely have time to do Source