Rich Seymour’s stochastic statements.

What the heck are you doing? Seriously, do you think reading something about procrastination will do anything for you in your needlessly dire predicament?

If that didn’t scare you off, here is a conception that I think fits into all of the rave ideas about productivity (under the ominous dude in suit talking about how to make your organization work more effectively (any guesses on how many readers of the book are close to running their own organization) book with its own TLA GTD):
You can do one of two things on a project:

1. Nothing
2. Something

Think of these as two points on a vertical line. (I’m thinking of this with time as the horizontal axis) Now only one of those points is lit up at a particular time, you are either doing something about the project or not. One could get into taking the deltas and doing some sort of renormalization group theory on it (hints of what I should be working on creeping into this), but let’s say for now you’re either on (#2) or off (#1). As time progresses and you find yourself procrastinating on project β it just means that you’ve spent to much time in mode (#1) reading stuff like this and a million other sites that just make me feel like I’m procrastinating just thinking about them. (Note that as the end of a given semester comes up, I think there is even more blog and email writing/traffic as people do exactly this.)

But there is another way, step aside from project β and go over to project α. Projects is broad, I mean doing the dishes to arranging the prelude to your opera. Something that is pretty dang easy to get started on and maybe has a nearly 99% chance of success (barring a broken dish or a really bad chord progression). Once you hit it off with project α you’ll be thinking, crap maybe I can go back and slog away at that miserable project β carrying some of this Rockin’ Project Starting (or continuing) Momentum! You may have not gotten anything done on β while you were working on α but at least you have something to show for it, instead of increasing your knowledge of out of this world news or whatever. So it’s like your still working within your one dimensional confine of time, but at least you are actually doing something, albeit orthogonal to the thing you were procrastinating on. Make sense..?

Good luck and get back to your own thing.

Other info:
this researcher says procrastination is bad. Yep.

posted by Rich at 10:44 pm
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