The Evil of Procrastination

I procrastinate like there's no tomorrow.

And indeed, procrastination is an evil illness of a thing. I've noticed that my own procrastination is like a self similar pattern where day to day habits of procrastination are represented in larger yearly bouts of procrastination. Unfortunately procrastination for me does not mean doing things later, it just means not doing things.

A strange and common feature of procrastination is to spend time half way between doing stuff and doing nothing, but not doing either very well. As I was finishing off my masters degree I would spend many a day couped up in my flat, pleased to have a whole eight, ten or however many hours to get through whatever I was working on. Yet I would end up noodling around doing all sorts of nonconstructive things and by the end of an eight hour period would have got the equivalent of thirty minutes solid work done.

What felt even more silly was that if after just one hour I had decided to have the day off and spend a it out doing something fun, I would have enjoyed myself a lot more and got the same amount of work done: nothing. Even knowing and being fully aware of this during a period of procrastination still wouldn't give me the ability to admit that doing nothing properly outside would be more fun.

So when it started to rain my procrastinating brain said "now I can't go outside to take a break from this procrastinating" and so the time wastage was alleviated slightly by me filming the rain and making a nice little video out of it.