"The check's in the mail."

"I'm putting the finishing touches on it right now."

"I've got it right here in my hand."

Anyone who has used these lines or has had these lines used on them knows exactly what they mean. They mean that the person using the lines is giving you something other than a finished product. They are giving you a load of horse puckey with which you could spackle the entire Great Wall of China. They aren't finished with whatever it was they were supposed to do; they most likely haven't even started yet.
Or perhaps this situation sounds familiar. It's well past midnight, you have a thirty-page essay yet to write, and you have just used the past two hours to type out the first 36,000 verses of "Mary had a Little Lamb" on your home computer. What do you do?
Anyone experienced in this area will tell you to get to work and write until you're done, pausing very infrequently. So what do you do? You shut off your computer and go watch the late late movie on HBO with the intent of waking up early in the morning and finishing the essay. Of course, you don't realize that it already is early in the morning. You wake up at 7:20 with ten minutes to get to school, rush around the house like a maniac, and decide to blow your essay off entirely.
It's called procrastination.
Everyone procrastinates to some extent, and those who bring procrastination to a glorified art form are labelled as "slackers" or "burnouts", but I think they're just smarter than the rest of us. They've proven to the world that they're not up to even the lowliest task and have been rewarded with little or no responsibility whatsoever. They have a brilliant plan obscured by the facade of apathy and ignorance they work so hard to emanate.
It's time to face facts: Procrastination has replaced baseball as our national pastime. If it hasn't, then why have we dedicated an entire week to it? Personally, I have never heard of any recognition week commemorating baseball, but National Procrastination week is held in the second week of March, which means it won't be celebrated until the following week, or perhaps early June, or possibly even as late as New Year's Eve.
Now procrastination is a highly specialized field, and it would be foolish for an amateur to try to put off everything all at once. In fact, the pressure they could be under might cause them to break down and get everything done early, ruining it for the rest of us who truly know how to put things off. Therefore, I have put together a little checklist for not getting anything done for a long time to come.

1)	Never put off for tomorrow what you could postpone indefinitely - Wait until the last minute, and then start procrastinating.
2)	Someone who says "There's no rush." should be taken quite literally. Anyone who says this is obviously naieve or stupid, and should be exploited to the highest degree.
3)	Deadlines are nothing more than rules, and as we all know, rules are meant to be broken.
4)	Everyone understands that it's human nature to procrastinate, and in fact, it's expected. Turn in your work "fashionably late."
5)	If you feel the urge to do your work coming on, fight it with all your might. Watch TV until neural paralysis occurs, or just fall asleep for approximately a geologic time period.
6)	If you do get your work done early, for you are possessed, do yourself and your peers a favor and hold onto it until it's overdue. That way your superiors will expect less of you and your colleagues, making it even easier to put things off.

In conclusion, I'd just like to say that procrastination is something we all do and... aw, forget it. I didn't really wanna write this anyway. I'll do it later; no one will care. Hmmm, I wonder what's on TV right now...

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Lies