My Biggest Problem

Procrastination.

Something I've laughed about or made light of all my life while it really has affected me (and not only me!) seriously. School papers, work projects, discussions that need to happen with colleagues or friends - everything is affected. The important things we should be doing are overshadowed by other things. A big contributor is lack of confidence - something I know I've been lacking the past few years.
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I've talked about 'Structured Procrastination' before, but that's a somewhat silly (yet serious) way of justifying procrastination - and definitely a useful tool for controlling it to do something better in a way...

The New Yorker has a new article that is very interesting, talking about the hows, the whys, etc:

Philosophers are interested in procrastination for another reason. It’s a powerful example of what the Greeks called akrasia—doing something against one’s own better judgment. Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. In other words, if you’re simply saying “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” you’re not really procrastinating. Knowingly delaying because you think that’s the most efficient use of your time doesn’t count, either. The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. In one study, sixty-five per cent of students surveyed before they started working on a term paper said they would like to avoid procrastinating: they knew both that they wouldn’t do the work on time and that the delay would make them unhappy.

Read James Surowiecki's full article here.

I also like the snippet Kottke quotes:

A similar phenomenon is at work in an experiment run by a group including the economist George Loewenstein, in which people were asked to pick one movie to watch that night and one to watch at a later date. Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing. This is why Netflix queues are filled with movies that never get watched: our responsible selves put “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Seventh Seal” in our queue, but when the time comes we end up in front of a rerun of “The Hangover.”

Partially just because the Netflix movie we actually received a few days ago and have procrastinated watching a bit is "Hotel Rwanda".


(via Kottke)

“Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.”

- Mark Kingwell