What a wanderer could wonder about...

Friday, October 26, 2007

Procrastination

I saw this interesting cartoon on our myETH pages today, which made me go read on Procrastination.

Procrastination is a type of "avoidance behavior" which is characterized by deferment of actions or tasks to a later time. It is often cited by psychologists as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision.
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For the person procrastinating this may result in stress, a sense of guilt, the loss of personal productivity, the creation of crisis and the chagrin of others for not fulfilling one's responsibilities or commitments.
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Procrastinators are also thought to have a higher-than-normal level of conscientiousness, more based on the "dreams and wishes" of perfection...
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Author David Allen brings up two major psychological causes of procrastination at work and in life which are related to anxiety, not laziness. The first category comprises things too small to worry about, tasks that are an annoying interruption in the flow of things, and for which there are low-impact workarounds; an example might be organizing a messy room. The second category comprises things too big to control, tasks that a person might fear, or for which the implications might have a great impact on a person's life; an example might be the adult children of a deteriorating senior parent deciding what living arrangement would be best.
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Traditionally, procrastination has been associated with perfectionism, a tendency to negatively evaluate outcomes and one's own performance...[wikipedia]

It just so describes me...

2 comments:

yzt said...

I don't know if you've seen this essay about procrastination by Paul Graham or not. Maybe it's a bit off-topic, but not much.
BTW, Paul Graham is an avid Lisp advocate. His writings on programming and programming languages are well worth reading.

bme said...

Thanks for the link to the interesting essay. Seems you can sometimes turn your supposedly weakness to your power if you are smart and daring enough to know how.

And yes I have heard about Paul Graham. I came to know he is a Lisp advocate a few days ago, when I had a discussion with a Scheme advocate who was talking about how Lisp and Scheme could be used for very serious web application programming, among other things, and he brought up Graham's Internet Store application written in lisp as an example! :D