Do you remember season five, episode two of Sex and the City? Unoriginal Sin depicts Carrie and Charlotte sitting at an absurdly chic coffee spot playing 1/100. In case your Bradshaw education is lacking, 1/100 is a game where you pick who, out of 100 passersby, you’d sleep with. Carrie is uninspired and has concocted a lovely distraction game that accomplishes nothing when her editor strolls by. Expecting her career to end, due to her column that is overdue, she is pleasantly surprised when, instead of a pink slip, she receives a book deal.

Have you noticed that when you time out certain actions, especially creative ones, you hinder the process that you’d naturally follow? For some reason, a deadline only really succeeds in killing the project and extinguishing your motivation. We’ve all procrastinated by watching Youtube videos- I’ve spent hours watching science remakes of the hits of today(The Molecular Shape of You, anyone?), completely avoiding anything with the slightest relevance to my actual studies. However, I think we’re missing something. We all look at our procrastination as a detriment to our work, but can we use that stalling to enrich the work we’re putting off? Maybe a deadline is an opportunity to find flexibility in an area of discomfort. Scrambling to turn in a project or focusing on distractions(1/100, maybe) can turn into a great creative outlet with new boundary-pushing ideas.

Let’s find a way to overcome that deadline slump, and if any of you have tips, please leave them in the comments. Also, to my lovely editor, I’m sorry if this is a little late… I had to binge watch Sex and the City for the tenth time for research.