in and out of focus

It's interesting to me how intensely I can focus on one thing sometimes.  Right now is not one of those times, except perhaps for an intense focus on the variety of things that steal my focus.  I remember in college how there were certain classes - ok, most of them - where I would put off the work until the night before or until a specific day.  I would devote hours of time to that one assignment, finish it, turn it in the next day, and usually do well.  I found that having a deadline approaching made the focus even stronger.  I particularly remember with joy my young adult lit reading, my bookmaking assignments, and Theology I.  I devoted Saturdays to young adult lit, where I would read a different teenaged novel it its entirety each Saturday then do a write-up to prove my read of it.  I read Twilight in a day -- though that was written much like candy, a cheap food substitute that tastes really good at the time but isn't that wholesome, and is really easy to just swallow huge amounts of quickly.  Inkheart may have been divided, I think mainly because only a half of the book was due at a time.  I remember in bookmaking we had a "class" book, in the sense that everyone had to come up with an illustration to a theme and then all the illustrations had to be used in each book in some way.  I turned cryptozoology into a fairy tale in rhyme where the over-eager peasant who goes to rescue the princess from the dragon does NOT win her hand in marriage, a tale with slight themes of feminism - let even the princess have the right to say no.  This was a bit of a challenge the night before... I was behind on the project since it took awhile to find an idea I liked, which of course including making a rhyming fairytale somehow involving all the cryptozoological illustrations... and the night before I only had the story done, so I re-illustrated everything by hand with colored pencil, cut out the pages and then bound them together and made a slip cover.  In Theo 1 we were told that our "projects" where we had a sheet of questions we had to look up and thoroughly answer could not receive a good grade if they were done the night before.  I think I took that as a little bit of a challenge, giving like 15 pages of single spaced replies, which took me about 6 hours the night before and earned me pretty much perfect scores.  (The number of pages decreased over the semester as I realized I probably didn't have to be as overly thorough and potentially long-winded as I was.)
...Then, of course, I can find myself overly focused on some mistake I've made at work that is thoroughly bugging me, some responsibility that has been given me that I haven't yet accomplished, or some kind of future event that I don't know the details of.

I find this interesting, because I can be focused in the utter quiet of the night with no music, just my mind, my eyes, my hands, and whatever I need to accomplish.  I know a lot of people who cannot focus in this complete kind of quiet and solitude... or who just have trouble focusing in general.