On Procrastination  

This continues a general trend I have on writing about what’s presently pertinent in my life. This week’s ending post, hence, can be about nothing other than procrastination, as that’s all I managed to do this week.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon this

And just a bit before that, I stumbled on this when Aaron died

I’ve always been pretty sensitive about my productivity and have had a lifelong habit of procrastination, but after the great work last week this week came as a total shock to me. With the help of drawkcab, weekly goals, and no more video games or TV, I had started to believe that I was on an upward trend and that there would be no real reason or inclination to procrastinate in the future.

For one reason or other, I was wrong. Grossly wrong, really. Until today, and only for a fraction of today, I’ve managed to accomplish almost nothing this week.

At first I thought it was because of poker. Because Anki had been ramped up to almost an hour and a half daily, it was so daunting/dragging of a morning challenge that I had started playing poker simultaneously to ease the 90 minute struggle.

This multi-tasking led to an drastic reduction in level of performance on both Anki and poker – primarily poker. After losing more games than I’d ever lost in one fell swoop, I desperately tried to keep playing to regain what I’d lost – terrible mistake. It’s an insidious thing – I didn’t feel I was doing worse on either of the two tasks, but the results speak for themselves. Should have learned my lesson from the countless studies done on multi-tasking, but I just had to believe that this was a likely exception based on subjective level of competence perceived.

I decided to institute a new ban on poker during work time, but unfortunately that didn’t solve anything. It took me almost 4 hours just to get started on Anki the next day – appeared Anki was becoming too daunting on its own.

So I drastically scaled back Anki, and today was the third day, and while much better than the days before, today was still rife with procrastination and bullshitting.

Why? I think it’s because the task at hand that I had to do was a bit daunting to me in of it self – drawing the figures for the patent. I, at least on some subconscious level, somewhat dreaded doing this as 1. I can’t draw and 2. I suppose it just seemed fairly vague enough and large enough of a task that I couldn’t get started.

I finally pushed out enough to get the brunt of it over today I hope – still have significant work to do tomorrow, but hopefully it’ll all be manageable if I do it right.

The keyword is doing it right.

Perhaps it’s subtle sleep deprivation as well – haven’t actually been getting that much sleep, though I haven’t been tired and I seem relatively capable during the day save for reduced willpower.

Interesting. I honestly don’t know. At this point, the only thing I think I can really try is 1. Finish all the other bullshit I have to do this week so as to be able to just focus on getting one big thing done tomorrow, and 2. Get enough sleep.

I’ve gotten started on culling all the other shit, and by tomorrow I should be down to just naming the parts of the figure and writing the description and operation sections for the main embodiments.

I hope. And hopefully I can get to sleep by 10pm tonight – that’s the goal. I guess we’ll see how things turn out tomorrow. Narrowing down the possibilities. Perhaps I still just suck at being productive or this week is just some strange anomaly. I hope not.