Productivity, procrastination, and other things
November 14th, 2008The past few days have been pretty unimpressive for me.
I’ve been spending a lot of time doing things that bring me a lot of short-term happiness: reading and re-reading short fiction I’m already well familiar with, watching videos on YouTube, things like that. I know that it’s not the stuff that I need to be working on. But there’s this draw.
The problem is not because the other stuff looks so attractive to me. The problem is that the things that I’m meant to be doing are looking harder and harder.
And thus I find ways to avoid those things. It suddenly becomes very, very important to read everything that’s been posted on Boing Boing today. It would be horrible if I missed something neat, wouldn’t it?
The solution, I am trying to teach myself, is not to convince myself of how very important the things which actually are important are.[1] I know that full well. I am very good at feeling guilty and completely blithely ignoring those feelings.
The solution is to make those things that I need to do as exciting, interesting, easy, and fun, and as immediately satisfying as anything else. Bit of a challenge, yeah. I started writing this post at about 7 pm. And got distracted.
[1] Love the grammar, yeah?