Procrastination: The Good, The Bad and The... Urgent

Procrastination! That unpardonable 'P'-word, the bane of teachers, clients and bosses the world over!

Ironically I'm writing this post, when I'm supposed to be looking through the Net for more jobs. Hmm... I'm getting quite irritated with my procrastination. It's not I don't have things to do - au contraire - I've lots of animation and design ideas that I'm itching to try out.

So, in the spirit of tackling this procrastination, I checked out Wikipedia, that famed haunt of procrastinators the world over, and found this nice entry on Procrastination. Obviously it wasn't done by a procrastinator - he or she wouldn't have gotten around to doing it. ;P

The Good
But Paul Graham argues that there's also good procrastination. He aptly puts it this way:

Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.

I like that one. :)

The Bad and the Urgent

The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination, because it doesn't feel like procrastination. You're "getting things done." Just the wrong things.

And the Urgent

Another reason people don't work on big projects is, ironically, fear of wasting time. What if they fail? Then all the time they spent on it will be wasted. (In fact it probably won't be, because work on hard projects almost always leads somewhere.)

But the trouble with big problems can't be just that they promise no immediate reward and might cause you to waste a lot of time. If that were all, they'd be no worse than going to visit your in-laws. There's more to it than that. Big problems are terrifying. There's an almost physical pain in facing them. It's like having a vacuum cleaner hooked up to your imagination. All your initial ideas get sucked out immediately, and you don't have any more, and yet the vacuum cleaner is still sucking.

You can't look a big problem too directly in the eye. You have to approach it somewhat obliquely. But you have to adjust the angle just right: you have to be facing the big problem directly enough that you catch some of the excitement radiating from it, but not so much that it paralyzes you. You can tighten the angle once you get going, just as a sailboat can sail closer to the wind once it gets underway.

I'll Stop Procrastinating... Tomorrow!
Haha... actually not lah. I found that the fastest way to stop procrastinating is just get into it when you're in the best mood - which is at the beginning. It may be procrastination of sorts, but ... I think ... if it fits in with your passion, and you're not sacrificing any essential time (essential as in, say, the house's on fire), then go ahead and procrastinate on the small stuff, even if it's urgent. Save your sweat and joy for the Big Stuff, what you were meant to do.

Because Urgent does not always equals Important. =)