All-Nighters

It is 5:42 am.
I have not started my essay that is due in 4 hours.
I have also not started studying for a midterm also in 4 hours.
Let us discuss this phenomenon called all-nighters. Given: Everybody wants to have more time during their day. I state this as a given because I overhear it constantly, and often think it myself. If the grapevine isn't credible enough evidence to you, then I don't know what is, so...deal.

I am a scientist, so these are the parameters within which I will try to frame this. Treated as a science experiment, it would go like this:
Hypothesis: If I stay awake, I will have more hours in which to complete this assignment, and if I factor in the time that will be spent not doing the assignment and subtract it from the amount of time I am gaining from not sleeping, then I will still end up with a time value sufficient enough to produce a quality paper.
Experimental Setup: Stay awake all night. Write paper. If paper is completed before the night is over, spend the rest of the night revising it (DO NOT make MLA mistakes. Graders are anal about those). Conduct Experiment.
Results: Paper started - 10:00pm. Paper completed - 7:00 am. Hrs awake - 9 hrs. Amount of time spent actually working on paper - 4:14 hrs. Grade received on paper - B+. Observations: Physical and mental capabilities seem to have completely left all test subjects around 6 am. All work done after this time was wrought with typos and grammatical errors. Extra trials were done. Standard deviation of error in final result: .0024 errors. Statistical analysis shows a direct correlation between the number of hours spent working on the paper past 6 am and the number of errors made.
Discussion: Results were as follows, but in full sentences instead of short choppy ones with poor grammar, blah, blah, blah. The sharp decline of valuable productivity after 6 am may have come from the fact that two previously unconsidered variables were added unknowingly at around 5 am: first, the subjects all showed signs of hunger, with some even reporting headaches, and second, upon interview, all subjects recognized 5 am as distinctly morning, giving them what we shall call a "sense of urgency" in their paper writing. Further error could have resulted from humans blah, blah, blah. We could have tried this another way, and we did, but gluing their eyelids open had disastrous results, which can be read in THAT publication. This really does apply to the real world, I promise! Get excited about the application of successfully titrating HCl and NaOH a thousand times! Blah, blah, blah.

Okay, so...given this experiment (mixed with some cynicism about lab reports in general), staying awake all night produces no real results. Nothing beneficial. So, why are we (or why am I) still doing it? Is it really that we cannot bring ourselves to focus on the task-at-hand without that "sense of urgency," some adderall (just joking), and ten cups of caffeinated drinks (only a little joking, seeing as this has happened before)? Or is it "starting trouble?" If so, what causes this mental block and why does the thought that "Shit, this is due in two hours!" seem to dissolve it like hydrofluoric acid dissolves glass. There must be some way to acquire this sense of urgency more than two hours before the due date/time. Without adderall. I believe that this can be done in two ways: One is to continue your sleepless pattern. Everything seems more urgent when one is that sleep deprived, and you can use the constant motivation of, "Right after I finish x, I can sleep." For obvious reasons, like death, this is inadvisable. Second, one can take him- or herself to a secluded corner, away from technology (especially the Internet and the cell phone), and refuse to leave said location for home, until the assignment has been completed. If you come back home from this place early, you will most likely end up like myself, right now, where I HAVE watched a whole SNL episode, checked Facebook a hundred times, read through old saved chat conversations, eaten 2 sandwiches, but still have not finished my paper (In my defense, I did get all my research done. I just haven't...compiled it yet). If the internet is necessary for your assignment, well...good luck.

I apologize if that was excessively long. Treat it as last week's post and this week's.