My options

A week ago, I had a meeting with my supervisor. We established that I had two more assignments left in our directed reading course: one (short, but still complicated) essay and a major annotated bibliography. We decided that I would try to get these finished before the history office closed for the holidays (this Friday). I also mentioned that I had four hours' worth of finals marking coming to me this week.

Here I am. I am half-way through the finals, and will be finished them this evening. After that, I want to finish off that essay. Only then can I begin the bibliography. That means, logically, that I'm not going to be beginning the bibliography until Wednesday.

I have the option of getting an extension until after the holidays, which seems like a wiser option than trying to bring together all of the major research in European cultural history by Friday. But part of my brain keeps saying "But you want to be able to take Christmas off! You want to be done! And you have finished so much research already!"

I've been wrestling over my options for the past few days. And I think I know what I'm going to have to do: tomorrow, once I have the finals and my essay ready to hand in, I'll ask my supervisor if we can get me an extension. Then, I'll still use Wednesday, Thursday and Friday for working on the bibliography. I'll still spend all of Thursday in the library. Maybe I'll pretend to myself that I'm still trying to finish it by Friday, just for the purpose of lighting a fire under me. But I want to make sure that this assignment is done properly and is well thought-through and analysed.

I already have been punishing myself far too much based on my false assumption that I'm able to knock off a short essay in less than a week. How about I learn from that mistake and allow myself the time that I need for this final assignment?

(And now: back to finals!)