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Good and Bad Procrastination
dtolton writes "Paul Graham has written an interesting article on Procrastination. He presents three different types of procrastination and one type of procrastination is even good! He also suggests that some types of "getting things done" are actually weak forms of procrastination. The only downside to this article is now you'll have to look at your procrastination with an analytical eye too!" Perhaps next year's Christmas shopping can benefit from the writeup?
Procrastination is like masturbation; you're only fucking yourself.
google.slashdot
I'll read it later.
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing." - Alan Perlis
I used to work for someone who was impossibly manic about things he wanted to do, which always meant things he asked "us" to do. I considered him visionary, but sometimes it was just too much.
My methodology was to mentally file away any requests (and there were many), and take no action other than to sketch mentally what the work would entail. The indicator whether or not it was real work I ever need do was if he came back to me in the next few days or so to see what progress I'd made for "task X".
Fortunately I was able to intuitively cull things that looked important from those that were simply "what ifs", and it was mostly a synergistic relationship -- I always had plenty to do from his bounty of ideas, but was able to be more productive by exercising a "procrastination policy".
I meant to get first post
...but I've just never quite gotten around to it.
It was horribly obvious, and boring. Slashdot - I know news is out there, I know you can do it better job finding it. What's with the decline of articles that are relevant or interesting at all?
leprkan...
This is very similar to my article on procrastination... well, it would be if I'd ever gotten around to writing it... oh well, guess I don't need to now...
In soviet Russia... no
Imagine a beowulf cluster... no
In South Korea only old people... no
Oh well, I will get around to it later.
This is a far more eloquent and humorous piece on the topic.
My photolog
You know it'll be there.
All your base are belong to Google.
I'm not a lazy bum... I'm a type-C procrastinator you insensitive clod!
What a novel concept! No, really...
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
The article links to Hamming's "You and Your Research". The submitter clearly fails for not including it in the writeup, since it's much more interesting.
Hamming's article mentions that the people w/ the open doors get more done then the people w/ the closed doors, yet isn't Graham's point that interruptions prevent serious work? Doesn't that disprove Graham's claim?
[o]_O
must be prayer.
Asking a mythical super being to do something for you that you are to friggen lazy to do yourself isn't going to work very well, but it is amazing how many millions of people do just that.
Oh well, what the hell...
could have missed the point of the article more.
Paul Graham inspired me to learn Lisp with his articles and I enjoyed seeing a whole different view of programming (what Python/Ruby is moving towards) than the C/C++ variants.
I read most of his essays and enjoyed this article too. It helped me finally understand what I knew for years - why those Mead 5-star organizers (and later PDAs) don't work for me and why they can be such a waste of time (except the contact list.)
I was going to do some research into this! I just never could seem to find the time...
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
I don't regard him as "visionary". I regard him as "A.D.D". Whatever the latest thing that catches his eye has to be assigned ... then forgotten. But a new shiney idea has to be assigned.
... but one of our sites had an old server without mirrored hard drives.
... you'll procrastinate. You'll get distracted by other tasks that are less important at the moment.
He's a bad manager because he cannot prioritize the items he is supposed to be managing (time, money and resources) to accomplish the goals he is supposed to be setting.
Example, we recently ordered 4 new servers for one of these projects
To me, procrastination comes down to understanding the big picture and your place in getting there. If you don't agree with the big picture or you don't have a big picture or you don't like you place
When that is the case, you need to adjust your picture or your place.
I procrastinate to develop stress. I use the stress as motivation. It's called eustress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Selye). It's like free coffee.
In the interim I purposely don't think about whatever it is. That often results in an answer, if not the answer, popping out of my intuition with far less work than it would have taken otherwise.
I call it being constructively lazy.
90% of everything is done in 10% of the time alloted. Why not just go ahead and accept it? All that other time you spent worrying could go to something a lot more fun.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Just because you're not working on something doesn't mean you're a "procrastinator".
;-)...
Personally the only thing I call procrastination is when I'm supposed to be working on something important, and I'm working on something less important.
Putting off unimportant tasks isn't procrastination, it's just being smart.
Doing nothing is also smart (when done in moderation). This includes reading slashdot, the most unproductive task EVER
Heck, even putting off something important can be smart, if it turns out you didn't need it (ever worked for someone that thought *everything* was super-important, top priority?)
The summary mentions "getting things done".. I don't know if that's a reference to the Allen's Getting Things Done system, but that's a good system for organizing your tasks.. sometimes just having everything written down is enough to allow you to kick back for 10 minutes and do nothing, yet appear super-productive to your peers. Organized people should read that book and get some ideas (disorganized people shouldn't bother, it won't help you, even Allen himself acknowledges this).
I was going to submit this article, but I had other important beer things to do...
TFA mentions:
He's saying that an approach that does tasks when they should be done that results in a net productivity increase is procrastination, specifically type-C procrastination.
Really though, it just seems like effective time manangement. The true intent of the article seems to lie in DEFINING time management - that is, not "Crossing items off of a list" but rather doing things when they should be done, or "sneaking off to work on some new idea"
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
As an inveterate procrastinator, I have to say that while I mostly agree with TFA's premise, it suffers from the usual oversimplification it decries.
Putting off little things can end in crushing defeat. Failing to do basic maintenance on one's body, one's vehicles, or other property, often will result in catastophic surprises, and usually at the last minute.
For years, I've regularly gotten my oil changed (or done it myself) in my vehicles. This past week I discovered the hard way what happens when you put off getting your coolant flushed. A blown head gasket meant I had to buy a new car. Merry Christmas to you, too.
Similarly, failure to do the little maintenance things at work (changing backup tapes, daily paperwork, etc.) can result in blowups of a more career-threatening sort. Every job has those details, and you ignore them at your peril.
How many people have great ideas while brushing their teeth or do their best thinking in the shower? Handled correctly (as habits), the mundane details don't interfere with higher purposes. Handled incorrectly, they put the higher purposes hopelessly out of reach.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
> from the massive-shuffle-of-geeks-sending-this-to-their-mot hers dept.
...
I'll send it
Tomorrow.
--Lord Nimula
And why would I give a damn of that procastration thing anyway ?
I was gonna post something as soon as this story showed up, but I was too busy chatting on MSN. Hm, I'd say something funny right now, but I feel like playing some Quake. Anyways, Uh... I'll think of something later.
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
Paul Graham's thoughts on procrastination overlap well with Paul Ford's thoughts on distractions, Followup/Distraction, and Are there "good" distractions?.
Graham:
I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.
Ford:
The most productive times in my life are the ones where I'm just doing my own thing, focused, and trying to solve some problem that I find interesting-when I'm narrowly distracted.
Same idea, different angle.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Slow news day, huh? Not surprising. Well, if this sort of thing interests you, you may also like my short article on the Protestant Laziness Ethic .
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
that which you can put off until the day after tomorrow.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
I am such a procrastinator... I didn't get my birthmark until I was 8...
I intend to post a more serious reply to this thread in a couple of days...
This article is a dupe. Zonk is just procrastinating posting the original.
am I wrong or slashdotters is one of the biggest group of type-B procrastinators ?
(well, you know : first post, polls, waiting for the next headline, moderation, karma and so on...)
there has to be some more important projects out there !
It's like there's a whole new geek subclass that seems to get their jollies over attempting to get "five 9's" uptime for their to-do list like computer geeks used to do back when uptime was an issue of skill rather than just throwing massive amounts of cheap redundant hardware at the problem.
If the fictional Herbig is what 'GTD' looks like, then please dear FSM let me party with the pasta procrastinators.
Yeah I'll mod you... later...
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
I'm going to read about the good kind first, then get to the others real soon now.
If you have realy problems with procrastination or think you might, find yourself a copy of Neil A. Fiore's Overcoming Procrastination. This book has been around since 1989 but has gone under the wire as a typical self-help book. This one, however will get you results. Self-help books are usually aweful because they give advice and methods that ignore the science of the problem. For instance, I've seen health and fitness books that give nutritional advice that any high school student should be able to refute!
:)
In the case of this book, you're shown the scientific explanations for procrastination and the author helps you understand if you have them and why you might. You're then shown intuitive ways to get yourself around the problem. What I found to be surprising is that the reverse psychology tricks worked very well for me. I didn't know reverse psychology could work if you know you're being played
The ISBN is 1567315569
Why put off 'till tomorrow what you can put off 'till someone else does it for you.
What real work didn't get done so someone could write this article?
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
am I wrong or slashdotters is one of the biggest group of type-B procrastinators ? (well, you know : first post, polls, waiting for the next headline, moderation, karma and so on...)
While moderation could arguably be Type-B, I'd call that stuff Type-A.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
They mean to say there is BAD procrastination????
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. -- G.B. Shaw
I wise man once said: "Never do today what you can't put off 'til tomorrow." Half the time the things that you are procrastinating are not really that important. Hence you would have wasted time getting them done when you could have done something else.
that maybe it's a bit ironic to be wasting time reading an article about procrastination?
Checkout Time Management for System Administrators
Right now I'm about to play some Battlefield 2 Special Forces, when I should really be getting my last Christmas present finished...
Once I'm bored with that (or in aching pain from the hours of mostly stillness), I'll head off to www.babes2night.com for hot lovin #4 for today... (this will cause the pain to become much worse).
Then, after this most vigorous physical activity, I will find that I desperately need the one meal a day which I usually have... so I will ring up my local Pizza joint.
After eating Pizza to excess and drinking way too much Coke, I'll continue onto my usual 24-30 hours awake : 10 hours asleep, completely out-of-whack-with-life body clock, on to another day of gaming, squirting, eating, sleeping and getting nothing of substance done.
Unfortunately for people who could make their lives much better, sometimes technology allows us to avoid or put aside reality to enjoy some fake virtual reality, which is perhaps for some seems like a better option than real life. It certainly seems to have some strong addictive qualities.
Somehow, I've held a girlfriend for almost 10 years and I treat my cat much better than I treat myself (3 meals per day, fresh water, attention between maps, allowed to warm my lap during fragging, etc).
I don't know who came up with this idea first, but I read it in Covey's
...
'First things first'. He suggests classifying tasks into four quadrants formed by (urgent, not urgent) and (important, not important), and asks you to get yourself more and more into the (important, not urgent) quadrant. If this requires you to say 'no' to a whole bunch of other things, why, it's all the better! To me, what Paul Graham says is quite similar "say no to other junk, make time for important stuff -- stuff that will give you the thrill of fulfillment not immediately, not tomorrow, but many days (weeks, months) later."
Now, if only I can figure out my life's mission
Now I'm working on decompilation (more generally binary program analysis) and hope that the same methods will work...
And next week on Slashdot: Dr. Phil on how to be a better you!
/. was techie sort of news site. Oh well, live and learn.
My fault, I am sure, but I guess I was under the impression
Yes, it is very possible that procrastination will allow you to get stuff done faster. Not other stuff, but the thing you are procrastinating about. See The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking for the details...
I used to do the "code-til-you-drop, then sleep until you can do it again" thing and I was incredibly productive. Now I have kids... and I'm still productive, but my life has a lot more structure. Interrupts are not necessarily a bad thing. If you're working on something important/interesting/compelling, then it's still going to be important/interesting/whatever after you change your two-year-old's poopy diaper. And if my code is so disorganized that I can't remember what I was doing ten minutes later, well, it probably wasn't going to work anyway!
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
it's always best in cs classes to wait until *after* the kinks of the homework have been done and caught by the fools who start early
As usual, we have a procrastinator(I'm one too, hell, we all are to an extent) attempting to justify procrastination by assigning to it positive traits. What if I avoided doing the laundry to do something great? Oh boy! Type-C procrastination baby!
What if you never do the laundry? Oh no!
Seriously, mundane tasks need to be done. Someone who repeatedly perform mundane tasks while deliberately avoiding matters of a grander scale could either be thought of as extremely dull or obsessive-compulsive. However, I have noticed that those who are neat, tidy, organized, and could be classified as "workaholics" always seem to make enough time for important stuff as anyone else(myself included). I don't think anyone who wrote a great novel or came up with a wonderful new invention put off doing something of the "useful but mundane" category to complete the task. I find that works of genius are often completed during time otherwise spent on truly useless AND mundane tasks, such as playing mediocre video games or watching bad television when there's "nothing better on right now".
There's quite a lot of idleness and boredom in everyone's life. All you have to do to accomplish something great is to figure out what it is you're going to do and then do it in the time you normally spend doing pointless, useless crap. It's quite a cop-out to claim that you're avoiding washing the dishes, cleaning the floors, doing the laundry, brushing your teeth, or performing some other essential task because you've embarked on some quest of great importance. Some stuff just has to be done, repeatedly, no matter how much you hate doing it. What do you do after you've finished eating? Wash your bowl.
Your mechanic didn't procrastinate in ripping you off, my friend.
:)
Blown head gaskets -- are simple, rubber/silicon/paper hybrid barrier between the HEAD (intake/exhaust chamber where the valves and plugs are housed) and the block (where all the other cool sounding parts of the engine live). This, sadly (and much to your now chagrin) -- isn't a vehicle-buying situation. It's a dishonest-mechanic-ass-kicking situation.
Instead, about $70 for the gasket and sealer, $70 for the tools, and 4 hours of labor (16 for the unintiated). Or just run down to your local [Insert Local Pepboys\Autozone equivalent] and get the sodden thing done while you're frisking away down main street getting a latte and doing some post-Christmas shopping that you really procrastinated on.
Idiot. Buy a new car!?
I for one welcome our new overlords...tomorrow.
Let me point out that this quote:
:)
But the trouble with big problems can't be just that they promise no immediate reward and might cause you to waste a lot of time. If that were all, they'd be no worse than going to visit your in-laws. There's more to it than that. Big problems are terrifying. There's an almost physical pain in facing them. It's like having a vacuum cleaner hooked up to your imagination. All your initial ideas get sucked out immediately, and you don't have any more, and yet the vacuum cleaner is still sucking.
..is very revealing. It's almost like you're explaining why Arc isn't finished yet. No? I stand to make much progress by contemplating your essay and hopefully overcoming my own fears enough to accomplish my own goals. But you might want to look in the mirror too. Thanks for the great essays though; even if they're procrastination at its best.
Best of luck!
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Now 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people, I'll believe and accept that.
That was reversed.
10% of the people make 90% of the people do the work.
Sorry, its late.
like family and friends.
Yes, hard problems take time and "errands" are annoying. But if you don't have time to bathe or do laundry, your advisor will never let you in the building to defend your masterpiece because nobody wants to be in the same room with you.
There is a limit to how far you can go before "genius" becomes "freak."
Man, I need to post to this story again, because it pisses me off so much. If I don't shave, then eventually the fuzz on my face won't come out w/out massive damage to your razor. If I don't shower, then I smell terrible. If I don't clean the sink/kitchen or take out the garbage, then I wind up w/ roaches. If I don't vacuum or dust, then dust and dirt and dander will just pile up and I'll have an asthma attack. Man, fuck Paul Graham, because this essay was like one long explanation about why I'll never amount to anything. What the hell?
[o]_O
say procrastinating for a few decades by not learning any other language other than LISP is a good good form of procrastination?
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
Reading that paper was a nice distraction from studying for the A+ Core exam.
I've always considered procrastination to be a virtue. If you start too soon on a project/job/chore, you'll likely spend way too much time finishing it. Waiting until the last minute forces you to strip the dreaded work to its essentials and eliminate the fluff. Plus, you minimize the opportunity for time-sucking avoidance behavior (which the author incorrectly labels as "type B procrastination").
post earlier, but I realized I had about 24 hours left to post. So I waited till later.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
Ill read it tommorrow
When you work for a clueless company that is always changing direction, then procrastinating doing work can save you a whole lot of work in the long run. Ever be working hard on something for a month only to be told later, oh, we don't need that after all. Identify that kind of thing and putting off the work can save you butt loads of time.
One of the things that I found that really help me get things done is to have a list of tasks that I am supposed to do, and to try to group them together. Then when I switch to working on any task in that project I go ahead and knock out a cluster of things together, and send it all downstream to the testers and apps developers.
I also always try to get one small task done a day, it doesn't seem like much, but in a years time those 365 things getting done adds up.
One of the dangers is to not spend too much time on the list, or in meetings. Those suck down time better than anything else.
I agree. I see the same thing very often with "I just found $20 in my wallet". I don't consider myself to be a (rabid) pessimist, but there definitely is no 'light' in getting your own stuff.
"Look on the bright side" is overrated. Don't look at any side, look at the whole goddamn thing.
Partial Credit: The Engineer's Best friend
"Well, the bridge didn't fall all the way down!"
I started to read the article, but after a few paragraphs opened it up in another firefox tab and decided to read it later.
There is a difference between proctrastination and prioritizing... prioritizing is the true "good"
This is where tools like project management, to do lists and calendars are helpful for me. If everything is done in 10% of the alloted time, then you're alloting far too much time to a task -- probably because you're used to procrastinating, and therefore spending too much time over a task.
I agree 100% that we don't have to be productive all the time, and that it's good to be lazy (see "The Importance of Living", by Lin Yutang, on this topic and related ones). But, if we take care not to mix our ideas of work with our ideas of idleness, I think we can both be more productive, and have more stress-free leisure time.
Recently I have read some
p
d AProjectTeam
material about team work written by
a Allen Fahden.
He talks about different roles in team work.
He has made a survey where your can find you natural work role.
http://www.oneminutemillionaire.com/tools/hots.as
Your start to procrastinate when the type of work your do, don't match your natural role.
And since project work includes 4 types of work, your have 3 kinds of work that your can
start procrastinating on.
But if your make a project team, so that at least one person is good at every type of work.
Your can speed up productivity with 300-800 %.
I have written a little about is here.
http://reprapdoc.voodoo.co.nz/bin/view/TWiki/Buil
People that find it interesting and would like
to join a team like that, can go to.
http://www.43things.com/things/view/417139
Just a comment on the shaving problem, The solution to this is in the type of razor you use. most modern razors use two or more blades with a small gap between them single blade razors also keep the same small gap.
This design is prone to clogging if the whiskers are much more than 24 hours growth.
The solution is the old fashioned safty razor. This has a double edged blade the design of these razors uses a castleated edge with the blade sandwidged between two curved plates
you don't get the clogging effect inherent in modern razor design and blades last longer even with daily use.
they are also extremely effective in removing a beard.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
This guy is just another corporate executive who has chosen to define his existance solely in terms of work. This article is an attempt to both rationalize his choice and to get more workers to also do nothing in their lives except work themselves to death for the profit of him and his fellow execs.
I have a +5 Insightful comment to this article... Which I'm going to post right after this short nap.
No more than 15 minutes, honest.
Frog blast the vent core.
If it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would ever get done.
In the immortal words of Handy "read a book". This is nothing new on the subject of procrastination. For an excellent overview of the psychology (pop) of the subject, as well as tips on dealing with it, check out The Now Habit by Neil Fiore.
What is urgent and not important? Give me some examples because I can't think of any.
ayottesoftware.com
"Hard work often pays off after time,
but laziness always pays off now."
http://www.despair.com/proc24x30pri.html
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Postponing your work to read _this_ article on /.
Well, I actually read Paul Grahms article...the whole thing. I think his points are spot on, but I think he is repackaging time management by calling it "good procrastination". At least time management as defined by Alan Lakien, one of the founders of time management (ISBN: 0451167724). Grahm describes "good procrastination" as putting off small, low reward tasks to do important big tasks. That concept is as old as the hills in time management where it is called "setting priorities". It isn't a revelation to anyone, what is a mystery is "why"? Why do I/you/people put off doing things they want to get done and know are important? I've read some interesting points that procrastination is a fear ( of failure or of success ) avoiding technique. It makes sense, when I avoid working on something I tend to sweep it under my mental rug, very fast, like I want to avoid even acknowledging what I am doing. Like a senator leaving a dominatrix's dungeon I found this article to be very interesting: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-200308 23-000001.html
I actually read Graham's article . In a nutshell, I agree with Graham.
8 23-000001.html
He isn't saying anything time management authors have not been saying for decades.
Instead of calling it "setting priorities" he renames it "good procrastination".
The big secret still left unanswered and what everyone wants to know is how to get over "bad procrastination", no matter how you decide to rename it.
I heard a comment recently that struck me as being insightful. That people procrastinate out of fear. Fear of failure, fear of success, perfectionism, etc.
Sounds intriguiging, I guess like everything else applying it takes work. I guess I will do that later ( ha ha ha ).
Here is an interesting pop psyche article I found out about that via google:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20030
I almost yelled "YES!" out loud when Graham theorized that startups got more done in the same amount of time for lack of interruptions.
I have worked for companies that just did not get ( or care ) that doing programming is a bit like doing math homework. It requires sustained attention and being allowed to sink into the problem. Being interrupted and forced to switch tasks loses that valuable momentum.
It sucks for productivity and quality and it also stresses the person trying to do the work.
On the other hand I worked for a startup where it was just 4 guys working mostly independently on laptops with our desks pushed together. We laughed and talked frequently during the day. Despite that we all got a lot of work done and had a lot of fun. We were allowed to focus on a task until it was done.