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Jan. 5th, 2006 12:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chhotiiLots of very chewy food for thought in this essay on procrastination that roozle pointed out.
Some thoughts, though:
* I would LOVE to procrastinate all forms of housework in favor of doing more important things. However, as long as my kid is young enough to want to eat dead bugs off the floor, cleaning is rather more important than usual. (I don't get a housecleaning service because I don't like the idea of strangers touching my stuff.)
* Babies are very very interrupt-driven. I may seem to have a lot of time on my hands, but it's not just broken up into slices, it's smashed up into smithereens, absolutely pulverized. (This is true even when I can hand Sophie off to her Grandma. If she knows I'm in the house, she gets very clingy and has to nurse every half hour. Sometimes I have to sneak around, hiding from baby, to finish a task.)
* People who fail to write novels don't do it by sitting in front of a blank page for days without writing anything. They do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need for their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email. Hah! Now people can fail to write novels by reading their friends' LJs 8,000 times a day, or striking up conversations on IRC, or checking the headlines on cnn.com, or consulting Wikipedia for the answer to every little question that pops into their heads, or getting into flame wars with strangers on mailing lists, or going off in some tangent in web research, or watching Strongbad or entertaining TV commercials on-line, or buying music, or or or... Technology has given us many ways to do nothing very very actively, so it doesn't feel like doing nothing. This is why one needs a to-do list of Procrastination Type B errands: When the Big Important Problem you've been working on sucks your brain out and keeps sucking, and you find yourself typing www.livejournal.com (or whatever your drug of choice) into a browser to deaden the pain, you can re-direct yourself to some Type B errands and at least accomplish some tasks that will keep some people from getting annoyed with you rather than completely, utterly, totally wasting your time.
* I need a virtual Richard Hamming in my head to interrogate me once in a while. Even at this point in time. Virtual Hamming would focus my Type-B tasks, at least:
Virtual Hamming: What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?
Me: Let's talk about the second part of that question first. I can't work on anything "important". Not like the things that were "important" in your work that have immortalized your name in signal processing and discrete math textbooks everywhere. I have to deal with all this baby stuff; for example, I have to clean the house; last time I let the baby have the run of the master bathroom, she was finding dead bugs and toenails to eat off the floor.
VH: So, just how does reading LJ help you clean the bathroom floor anyway?
Me: Right. Time to close the computer now
Some thoughts, though:
* I would LOVE to procrastinate all forms of housework in favor of doing more important things. However, as long as my kid is young enough to want to eat dead bugs off the floor, cleaning is rather more important than usual. (I don't get a housecleaning service because I don't like the idea of strangers touching my stuff.)
* Babies are very very interrupt-driven. I may seem to have a lot of time on my hands, but it's not just broken up into slices, it's smashed up into smithereens, absolutely pulverized. (This is true even when I can hand Sophie off to her Grandma. If she knows I'm in the house, she gets very clingy and has to nurse every half hour. Sometimes I have to sneak around, hiding from baby, to finish a task.)
* People who fail to write novels don't do it by sitting in front of a blank page for days without writing anything. They do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need for their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email. Hah! Now people can fail to write novels by reading their friends' LJs 8,000 times a day, or striking up conversations on IRC, or checking the headlines on cnn.com, or consulting Wikipedia for the answer to every little question that pops into their heads, or getting into flame wars with strangers on mailing lists, or going off in some tangent in web research, or watching Strongbad or entertaining TV commercials on-line, or buying music, or or or... Technology has given us many ways to do nothing very very actively, so it doesn't feel like doing nothing. This is why one needs a to-do list of Procrastination Type B errands: When the Big Important Problem you've been working on sucks your brain out and keeps sucking, and you find yourself typing www.livejournal.com (or whatever your drug of choice) into a browser to deaden the pain, you can re-direct yourself to some Type B errands and at least accomplish some tasks that will keep some people from getting annoyed with you rather than completely, utterly, totally wasting your time.
* I need a virtual Richard Hamming in my head to interrogate me once in a while. Even at this point in time. Virtual Hamming would focus my Type-B tasks, at least:
Virtual Hamming: What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?
Me: Let's talk about the second part of that question first. I can't work on anything "important". Not like the things that were "important" in your work that have immortalized your name in signal processing and discrete math textbooks everywhere. I have to deal with all this baby stuff; for example, I have to clean the house; last time I let the baby have the run of the master bathroom, she was finding dead bugs and toenails to eat off the floor.
VH: So, just how does reading LJ help you clean the bathroom floor anyway?
Me: Right. Time to close the computer now
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Date: 2006-01-05 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 08:31 pm (UTC)I need a virtual Richard Hamming in my head to interrogate me once in a while.
That would make a great plug-in in Snowcrash.
...or watching Strongbad...
First thought: OO! I should go catch up on Strongbad! Quod erat demonstrandum.