procrastination gyration

I'm writing a paper again, and it's due tomorrow, so I think I can assure you that this will be brief.  It's the first paper I've written since the one that went so badly at the end of last semester, so I'm feeling a little intimidated.  And especially because it's for the same professor-- whom I like very much, I have no complaints about her.  I'm just intimidated by her red pen, so to speak.

The encouraging thing is that the system that I had worked out by the end of last semester for getting a paper together is working really well.  The depressing thing is that I can't understand why it always comes down to the last minute.  Why do I do this to myself?  I very consciously set out not to do it this this time.  I set aside the entire weekend to work on this paper exactly so that I wouldn't end up at 9:15 the night before it was due with two or three hours of work still in front of me.  But here I am.  There's something about my brain, about the part of my brain that blurts out words to be typed into a paper, that just refuses to function until the proverbial gun is held to my head and I have to do it.

This paper is only has to be 7 pages or so, so it's not as huge a thing as it was at the end of last semester, when I had three twenty-page papers to finish in the space of ten days.  If I had one of them done a week ahead of time, it would have made all the difference in the world, but I just couldn't make myself sit down and do it.  I think it's dread.  Actually, I know it's dread.  I'm just not sure exactly what it is that I dread.  That the paper will be horrible?  that I'll make a bad grade?  that I won't like what I've written?  maybe all of the above.  But I really, really need to get it figured out before the end of the semester.  I only have two 20-page papers to write this time, plus a 10-page report of work for my independent study, but that's enough. 

Do you procrastinate?  Do you have any tricks you can share that you use to get yourself to work ahead?