Finishing up a good program is a rush.

Entirely irrelevant: this text box is a lot more daunting to start typing into when it's empty than when there's some text in it alreay.

Excelling in this subject (computer nerdery, particularly programming) is pretty darn awesome. What you've done works, even works well. Exactly how well it works is entirely the result of your own effort, and is entirely your own responsibility. You can improve it arbitrarily by putting in any quantitity of additional effort you feel like. It's a high (*) from awesome things happening and you being in perfect control of them. You make what you intend to see done perfectly and precisely clear to the machine and to the reader - and, in the process, to yourself - and then the machine goes off and does exactly the right thing - because you have told it to do exactly the right thing.

My goal in life, for the moment, is to hit up that rush as often as I possibly can. For the moment, what I'm doing well is managing to blast through, by dint of good coding habits, tasks that I ought to be failing miserably by dint of my awful work habits. What I need to do better right now is improve those work habits so that deadlines are more comfortable and my marks will come out higher as a result. Simply resolving to do better about this isn't going to succeed - I know, I've tried it. I just end up making myself feel moody and annoyed about things. What I'm going to do instead is to try to do things in two big bursts - one at the first minute in addition to my usual one at the last minute. Time in the middle I'm going to worry about less, because I'm usually best off spending that percolating over the problem at hand anyway.

(* oh dear, seems I might be a control freak? Maybe.)