Friday, February 12, 2010

procrastination

So rather than finishing up and publishing the blog post I have sitting in "draft" right now, I'm getting somewhere on my quest of developing a better articulation of myself.

I (funny enough, am actually at work, procrastinating on my project) and was doing a bit of reading into INTJs, and hoping to find strategies of putting my Myers-Briggs personality type to work for me in some productive manner.

Discovery: there's a term for my procrastination!

I am a structured procrastinator.
The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important.
Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.
This explains why I insist on "doing too much" and why I don't "do anything" between Thursday night and Sunday evening, yet pull all-nighters in the middle of the week.

Last thought on this topic:
As for life in general, I think my problem is that I tend to plan things out in my head too much so that by the time it comes to do something I can't be bothered doing it because I've over-thought it and am now bored of it, or I don't want to be disappointed with how the reality compares to the perfect image in my head. It's why I put off watching films that I'm really looking forward to and doing things that I really want to do. Reality is so much less perfect, much less controllable and certainly more hard work than life in my head.
SO TRUE. This is probably why I'm not really getting anywhere on my capstone yet, although I've thought about it a lot. And explains all these "somewhere topic related but not really and I'll admit it" blog posts I've been putting up over the last couple weeks...

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