Jonathan Meyer.

I have never understood people who get things done ahead of time. I’m sure as my editor Rob reads this, he’ll be thrilled to know my stance on working right up to a deadline. Outside of my work life I can assure the professors at my great institution, I will get my work done on time, and not a moment sooner!

This week I was tasked with giving a problem-cause-solution speech in an oral communication class. Formal speaking isn’t my favorite thing in the world, however I am capable and enjoy putting on a bit of a show for an audience of my peers. In the speech I was tasked with having at least ten references and orally citing six of them. We were expected to research in class for a few weeks before putting our information together over about a week and have a speech prepared. That sounded just dreadful! Not wanting to conform to the rest of the class I simply did other work while sitting in the class. No one seemed to notice so I kept on doing my own thing.

Eventually speech day was here, and I had nothing prepared yet. I did not worry and I was not scared. Starting at eight in the morning I worked for a few hours carefully piecing together information. I landed on the topic of newspapers closing around the country, something you can imagine is important to me. With a bit of passion and the pressure of not wanting to look stupid in class, I scraped together my speech and was all set to go.

Using a newspaper as one of my visual aids, I got through the speech that I had started less than six hours ago. Regardless of the grade I was immensely happy with my five minutes of orally expelled excellence. Professor Pam graded the speech the next day and I was astonished at seeing a 246/250 as my score, receiving only minor violations for a few insignificant details.

While I have yet to be burned by my same day approach, I would not recommend doing your work like this. Maybe someday I’ll work ahead, but until then I’m Just Jonathan.