The weekly sermon essay crisis?

Is your sermon preparation rather hand to mouth, a bit like a weekly essay crisis? Perhaps the deadline helpfully focuses the mind and makes you decide between your three different outline and your plethora of exegetical and applicatory notes, but is it ideal that the ink is still wet as you preach? Do you pray over and get familiar with your notes so that you can preach it without the distraction of remembering what to say next, so that you can concentrate on what you are saying, and how you want to say it, and those to whom you are speaking? Or even think of God in the whole thing?!

So, how much is this an issue? And if it is less than ideal, what might one do about it? Do you just resolve to have it "finished" (= preachable) the night before so that you can spend the AM in prayer and memorisation? And what if you don't have steely self-discipline?!