Although I haven’t been able to indulge much into procrastination lately (yeah right!), the habit is easy to come and rob my living hours from my otherwise productive life. And by productive I don’t mean work; I mean not doing things that don’t contribute to anything in my life. You know what I’m talking about; vegging out in front of the TV instead of working hard on projects, playing videogames instead of pursuing constructive hobbies and browsing the internet instead of typing a report due soon(under the pretense of ‘research’).
This article by John Perry, prof of Philosophy shows that PHL profs do more than fight on word definitions or logical syntax. It is a very insightful essay, written by what appears to be a friendly, nutty guy. He indeed illustrated a way to satisfy both aspirations of a normal human being at any given moment:

• being productive at an important task
• doing anything except the said task

Ah-ha! You recognized yourself didn’t you? Well, here are examples of clever ways to effectively waste time and do a lot of things:

1. Read articles and write your thoughts on them instead of working on projects.
2. Go to the XXX department and file numerous forms/requests instead of working towards the impending deadline.
3. Contribute to that open-source thingie on SourceForge instead of filing those damn tax forms.
4. You get the point…

Yeah, as it turns out, you WON’T do your main task anyways, so instead of wasting your life and piling calories by eating your own snot in front of the tube, you might as well do something which will contribute to your growth.

Conclusion

• Wasting time is good, if you ‘waste’ your time productively (oxymoron, i know).
• There are a number of tasks to be done at any given time, doing the least important one when the most important one is due might actually make yourself look ‘productive’.
• John Perry played ping-pong, read his newspapers and pigged out on snacks to avoid work and in turn was acclaimed for being ‘close to his students’. What a fraud.
• This blog is good for me =)
• Man I’ve done so much stupid things just so I wouldn’t be productive.

Go forth and be productive amigos.

Thursday, June 1st, 2006 @ 8:35 pm motivation
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