Wednesday, October 1, 2008

A Perfected Imperfection

Let’s start off by telling you that I am a procrastinator.

No duh.

I know I said in the description of this blog that I wouldn’t talk about myself, but, seriously, who doesn’t know this by now? It’s been a long time since I wrote one of these. It’s painfully obvious that someone procrastinates when they haven’t updated a weekly blog in two months.

See? I just did it again. I just went and looked up the date of my last blog entry. Not to add a bit more information to the blog, but to stop myself from needing to write more that exact second. Heck, I’m procrastinating right now! This entire blog entry is an excuse for me to stay awake. It’s after 1:00 AM and I’m writing this just so that I don’t have to go to bed. I know I have to (I’m tired, it’s late, I’m the only one up) but I really don’t want to yet.

So, here I am, finally getting around to writing a new blog entry. Why? Because it is lower on the list of things I have to do than going to bed, though not by much. See, that’s how we procrastinators work. We have a set list of things that we absolutely have to do, whether already over-due or not, and we tend to migrate to the one about half-way down the list. Why not go all the way to the bottom? What else would you have to do when you don’t want to do what you’re doing? It’s quite simple.

It’s a lot worse with people who procrastinate and are lazy. Then, not only do they not want to do anything high up on the list, they don’t want to bother to look at the list to find out what they can do to avoid it. So, they end up doing nothing. Watching TV, surfing the net, playing some games, listening to music, playing jump rope with some seaweed, whatever pops into their head at the time that isn’t at all important. These are the people who always go past deadlines and do horrible jobs on things because they have to rush something to get it in at all.

These people are completely undependable.

As I said, I am one of these people. In fact, the only reason I defaulted this high up is because my favorite video site is down and I’m too lazy to find a new one. However, there seems to be hope for us. According to John Perry there is a way to make this defect work for us, but it involves a little self-trickery.

I’ve been slowly realizing this by myself, but my procrastinating nature never got around to finishing the puzzle. All you have to do is assign yourself tasks that seem very important (but aren’t) and seem to have a set deadline (but don’t) and trick yourself into thinking that it is the most important thing on the list. Then, you start to do the things that need to get done as a way to avoid the bigger (yet unimportant) project. If you constantly check back with your mental list of important things that need to be done that are lower on the list than the big project, you’ll get a lot done, and feel a lot better about yourself. People will also start to notice you as someone who gets a lot of work done, rather than someone who gets nothing done.

It’s a bit of a relief that we can put two bad qualities of ourselves to good use, procrastination and self-delusion. As long as we keep these in mind, we can always get what we want done.

Now then, let’s see if that video site is up and running again.