help, I'm unprepared for a presentation tomorrow

[Gingersnap]

should I make up a lame excuse and cancel?

I am supposed to give a presentation--a dry run of an upcoming academic conference talk--tomorrow to a campus audience in a sort of informal/supposedly low pressure environment. But I spent too much time procrastinating on the presentation and now I know it will be a boring waste of everyone's time. I'm wondering if I should preserve my reputation with the group (good now, they've liked my presentations in the past) and bow out, with a car problem excuse. I hate lying, but I also have the really bad habit of taking on too many "extra" projects and going needlessly crazy over them.

Any opinions?

[roguevalley]

1. do what you can. if it means cancelling, do so.

don't kill yourself over it but reevaluate how this happens and see
if you can do something so that you don't end up this way again. it doesn't sound like fun, hon. Cancelling with a lame excuse is acceptable <insert teacher tone here> if you learn from this. I would hate to think you felt this awful more than once. :)

Hugs.

[NJCher]

2. yeah, cancel

Nobody wants to endure a bad presentation.


Cher

[Kenneth ken]

3. can you cancel early

enough that it frees up eveyone to reschedule their day? Otherwise, you're wasting their time anyway.

If you can cancel, that is probably ok, if you can't, wing it!

By going through with the presentation, it might give you the kick-in-the-pants (in a bad way) that you need to push yourself out of the procrastination habit. i.e if you have a bad experience to recall, it might keep you from procrastinating in the future.

[Gingersnap]

4. Thanks for the advice

I don't usually have such problems with procrastination that this is a chronic occurrence--so it's not like I need a "lesson." I've had a lot of deadlines lately and have been using my energy to work on an unrelated (but equally important) project and i've had a hard time switching gears back to this one. My biggest mistake was agreeing to do it in the first place.

My worry is that the presentation is the only thing scheduled for that slot, so even if I call it off early (the presentation is at 4 pm), there won't be time to reschedule anything else. So I would feel guilty for having the speaker's series lose a week just due to me. On the other hand, maybe people would be relieved not to have to go to it this week and perhaps if I hadn't volunteered last week, they wouldn't have had anything on anyway.

Ugh, I hate making these decisions and am really hating myself for letting things go for so long on this.