Active Procrastination · 9:38pm May 29th, 2013
I'm lazy. That's a fact I've come to recognize and appreciate. Part of it, I can blame on my severe ADHD (for which I am heavily medicated), but a lot of it is just me. Over the years, I've come up with a tried-and-true method for combating my own laziness, which I hope now to disseminate to the masses. It's called "Active Procrastination".
Full disclosure: I didn't come up with that name. "Active Procrastination" is a phrase coined by someone I can't be bothered to source properly right now, who also wrote a pretty nice article on how and why it works. I, however, came up with a similar method independently, and it is that which I hope to share here. In brief, active procrastination is when you put off a distant, unpleasant task by completing other, still-important and less-distant jobs.
Fig. A: Rainbow Dash demonstrates improper procrastination technique.
To anyone who's ever put off a responsibility, it's not hard to see what I'm talking about. Any student knows how much cleaning, organizing, and freelance poetry one can do in an effort to avoid that dreaded literary analysis paper. The trick is in deciding what task to put off in order to maximize productivity. It should be unpleasant, with a deadline that is at once vague and distant, yet requiring regular action. It should also be of relatively minor importance, ideally, but you must convince yourself that it is vital. Otherwise, all is lost.
I'll give you an example to show what I mean. A few months ago, back during the academic year, I had a huge term paper to write for History of Science. It was just about the last thing I wanted to do. Fortunately, I knew the professor for that course very well, and I knew exactly what he wanted out of the paper. I had every confidence that I could crank out a decent paper the day before it was due and still get a good grade, so I made it into my motivation to get other things done. I'm very good at self-delusion, so I convinced myself that the essay was much more important than in truth, as well as much less pleasant. By allowing it to hang over my head, I managed to use the time before it was due to complete several job applications, write most of a new chapter of some writing project, build a skyscraper in FTB (which I heartily recommend, incidentally), and much more besides. On top of that, I got an A on the paper.
"Oh, that makes much more sense."
Again, the trick lies in choosing the task to put off. It'll take some practice, but eventually even the laziest of procrastinators can learn to be hard-working, productive members of society. Hey, it worked for me!
Though this may also be responsible.
Awesome c: I'm gonna have to give that a shot.