Good and Bad Procrastination 158
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?
I have a boss like that. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 use it (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:procrastinating worked for me... (Score:4, Insightful)
https://studentloan.citibank.com/s/faaonln/resour
http://www.brefigroup.co.uk/acrobat/quadrnts.pdf [brefigroup.co.uk]
Basically, a task can either be important and urgent, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, or unimportant and not urgent. Instead of dealing with all tasks as urgent whether they're time wasters or not and running around like a chicken without a head, you're taking the time to sort out what's important and what's not before doing anything. That's not procrastination. That's just good time management.
Ob procrastination quote:
"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say."
-- Will Durant
Not so fast (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Kids.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Re:procrastinating worked for me... (Score:2, Insightful)
There really isn't a type of procrastination that is good, because as the parent said, it's almost always rooted in some fear. Sometimes you don't realize the fear that is the driving force ("Fear of success" is a weird motivator, because why would you be afraid of success??? "Fear of failure" is a weird motivator, because through procrastination, you actually make failure more probable). Usually though, if you think it out, you notice that you're afraid of completion of the task for some reason.
For instance, I used to be late for stuff all the time, and I realized it was my way of asserting my control over a situation (late to hand in an assignment at school, or late to pick up a girl for a date). Even when I wasn't late to hand in an assignment, I always put it off to the last minute so I could be sure to have that security blanket of "oh I didn't really try" in case I did poorly on it. It's not that I've totally obliterated procrastination from my life, but actually noting the REAL reason I procrastinate (if you can figure it out) helps a hell of a lot. I look at those reasons and realize that I'm actually being a ball-less passive aggressive coward, or I'm being a big baby that's afraid of life. When you realize that you're acting like THAT, it's a lot more natural to correct the behaviour. If you think procrastinators are just lazy and just need self-discipline, you're misunderstanding the problem entirely.
Anyway... sorry to get all "Dr. Phil", but I know there are a lot of other people out there who are routinely paralysed by procrastination and haven't got a clue how to start fixing it. Self-discipline is a very finite and temporary resource, and shouldn't be relied upon...
Re:I use it (Score:3, Insightful)
So yeah, sometimes you are constructive, but many a times you have wasted 10 times the amount the time it would have taken to solve the problem.
zerg (Score:3, Insightful)
They forgot one. (Score:1, Insightful)
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.