I'll do it later

"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say." -Will Durant

Procrastination is a funny thing. Its a way of life for students. Acknowledged by all, hated by most, and joked about and almost flaunted by many. I read a couple interesting articles on procrastination, started from this Slashdot post, interestingly the first article suggests that procrastination can be good. Check em out:

Good and Bad Procrastination
Structured Procrastination

Great opening question from the first article: "The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad?" The second article just makes me laugh. Sadly it seems so true though... lol

Some interesting ideas here to be sure. If we're putting off less important things to do more important things that's good right? I'm pretty sure Albert Einstein put off cleaning his room from time to time while finishing up the theory of relativity... a few thoughts on these issues though:

-Priorities: This is assumed that you can properly assess what things are important. This has large implications both ways. What I've been learning about life is that the seemingly small things are not so small at all. As Oswald Chambers remarked "It is ingrained in us that we have to do exceptional things for God—but we do not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things of life." We may easily thing petty things crucial, and mislabel the great things of life as fluff.

-Balance: "Saying 'yes' to one thing means saying 'no' to another". So say if I devoted myself to yo-yoing, yeah that area of my life would blossom, but it comes at a cost. These "impressive people" may be impressive in certain areas, but by consequence of being highly devoted to one thing - they are less devoted to other things. We simply cannot do everything.

-Perception/Expectations: Often I heard conversation along the lines of: Tom: "yeah I'm a bad procrastinator". Dick: "no you have no idea, I'm the worst procastinator". Besides that weirdness of bragging about procrastination... Perhaps its our overproductive, overbusy society - but we all have this view that we are never doing enough. Now then it could just be that our standard of productivity is just warped. This can easily lead to guilt and despair - neither of which are terribly motivating. I think we need to learn to give ourselves a break and learning to set reasonable expectations.

Part of me is a bit adverse to the Structured Procrastination idea... trying to produce good from our natural tendency to avoid the large tasks on our mind.. lol

Thoughts? Secret confessions of closet procrastinators? :P