Progress. I know, my coworkers have been whinging and whining about the influx of our workload for weeks. You’re probably sick of hearing about it, but bear with us. You’ll have your reprieve soon enough, and so shall we, since this Friday is our deadline. 5 p.m. on Friday, to be exact.

Which is less than 36 hours from when I sat down to write this column. That’s not a lot of time. Wow.

(Calming breaths, Melissa. Calming breaths.)

High levels of stress does strange things to people. For me, it triggers a procrastination streak a mile wide. As shocked and appalled by this latent tendency as I always am, this year my procrastination has reached startling new levels. Yes, even for me.

I’ll give you a few examples. On Saturday, I actually got up in the middle of a sentence to floss. Floss! Just for the heck of it. I hadn’t even eaten anything. I pulled a similar stunt Sunday, only this time it was to iron. Iron! Like anyone cares about wrinkles during Progress week.

I’d like to say my distraction was confined to the time I spent attempting to work from home. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. I was marginally more productive back at my desk in The Evening Sun newsroom on Monday, but not as much as I would have liked. My diversions of choice? The gym and compulsively reading articles online.