I am suffering from the worst kind of procrastination. The kind where you do everything you possibly can, to avoid doing the one thing you really ought to be doing. In my case I need to be writing.
I thought of writing about what I need to be writing, but I don’t see how that will work because until now I have avoided even looking at the wordprocessor (using a keyboard can be really good as a time waster, just surf the web and click on everything).
Another really great way of procrastinating is to think up other projects you could do that don’t involve the one task you really want to do right now. My great project: learning Spanish. I actually do want to learn Spanish, but I know that my investigating Spanish-learning options right now is just a ploy to avoid the writing.
So far I have managed to avoid even mentioning what it is I need to be writing about. I am very good at this procrastination ploy!
…
I need to write about the RSS experiment at work and how it’s been going, dress it up a bit as a look at RSS in academic libraries and the sorts of resources we commonly use that are now beginning to provide RSS feeds for their users. It’s not that hard really but geez it’s hard to get started.
…..
Well it helped a bit to write in desperation, because I went and looked at the article in the other Word window and started hacking away at the keyboard. However my other problem now is that I seem to be writing in blogese:
PubMed – Any search conducted on this major database can now be turned into an RSS feed that can be subscribed to. Every database should allow this!!
So academic. NOT!
LOL… I can’t win!
I tried to be proactive yesterday, when I found myself on a roll blogwise, and wrote three blog entries – I saved one (‘Memed’) for posting first thing this morning so that I wouldn’t have the temptation of sitting at my keyboard and writing about anything and everything but what I should be writing. So I posted this morning, and then proceeded to read. The news, blogs, more news, more blogs, part of the novel I am reading at the moment, more news, and so on, until it was 12 noon.
(In case you’re wondering, I am having a day off today, a so-called TOIL, “Time Off In Lieuâ€, day. My goal today was to at least get the structure of my article figured out. Hmmph.)
Categories: procrastination, discipline, writing
6 Comments
TOIL = time off in lieu, that’s kinda juxtapositional <-- if there's such a word. Anyways, no wonder you are blogging like mad. Remember to not waste all your good material for the week in just one day. 🙂
That’s the worst thing about accessing one’s amusement via the same vehicle/equipment as one’s work. I have the same issues. When i stare at my screen it plays out like this: work emails… net surfing… work emails… blogs… work emails… anything else on the net that doesn’t involve work. It just goes round and round. I have no self-control when it comes to surfing.
Mooiness, I think I’ve used up all my material now, never mind about good material 😉
Cherry, at my work they track how much you download over the course of a day, and if you reach a certain level you get audited. I think you would only come to their attention if you were doing something stupid like downloading music, but it has the effect of making me slightly more careful about how much and when I surf using my work PC… Of course, librarians can claim it’s all research! 😛
Being able to justify blogs and RSS as “research” is pretty damn funky, I have to admit 🙂
You’re writing an academic article on RSS in the library? Huh. Cool. I doubt you need advice but I’m going to give some anyway 🙂 – when I can’t start something, I just start writing a training conversation to someone else, as if I were transcribing a conversation to my non-tecchie parents (“RSS is cool! It stands for Really Simple Syndication and means that you can subscribe to newsfeeds … “).
Then I go and write the structure that came to mind when I was writing the speech.
Then I go write something that doesn’t resemble the structure at all except at some level of derangement in my own mind.
And then I’m generally on a roll and can bash out an actual article that can be tweaked into proper shape.
Note: advice from an ex-technical writer with a severe case of ennui, YMMV, and choose to ignore anything I’ve said :).
Oh, and you can’t go wrong with chocolate and chips as supplies 🙂
Hi Fiona! Thanks for the suggestion – I hadn’t thought of doing that, and you know, it might just work! Will have to try it. And now that you mention the choccie and chippies I know that’s partly where I went wrong – I had none!
Here’s another thought – blog the beginnings of the article! Educate us!
Well, hell, I’ll have to write one as well one day, so you might as well write it and then I can steal it :).
And yes, chips and chocolate is essential. If it’s cold, hot chocolate with lots of cinnamon is _definitely_ acceptable 🙂