Slashdot Mirror
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
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
Usually Paul Graham's social writings are quite good. Try his "why nerds are unpopular" or "What you'll wish you had known"
Bottles.
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
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.
Tomorrow.
--Lord Nimula
I don't know where you are, but here in America (where most Slashdot staff and users are) today is a federal holiday. Federal holidays mean slow news, since almost everything is shut down (nobody wants to work Christmas day). In my town, there is one Chinese restaurant and a few gas stations open, EVERYTHING else is shut down.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
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.
I'm going to read about the good kind first, then get to the others real soon now.
"you could work on...something more important. That...I'd argue, is good procrastination."
Working on something more important is a good thing? I'm sure this guy is going to face a lot of detractors that say that working on something less important is better. I hate it when essays have filler like that.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
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
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...
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?
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
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").