I noticed on a recent Saturday Salon thread a number of people were discussing having theses due in soon (Mr Mark is in the same space, trying to turn himself into Dr Mark). If the Superbowl is Tony Soprano’s “busy season”, this surely is the busy season for tertiary students of all kinds. And for tertiary teachers – I can remember years ago at Troppo, Ken Parish’s blogging used to take an upward curve the more exam papers he had to mark. So… what’s your favourite procrastination technique? Aside from blogging, that is!
36 Responses to “Creative procrastination”
Leave a Reply
Please read the comments policy. If you would like an icon beside your comment, please register a Gravatar.
There is a Comments Preview function below the typing box which activates when you start typing.
Reading blogs.
I should be asleep. And if not asleep, working on one of my three assignments, instead of blog-blabbing on about Wordpress again.
Yeah … what Jacques said. My thesis is due in February, which means I’d better go to bed now.
http://bash.org/?random
I feel guilty if I’m not doing something vaguely related to my study, so I spend long hours planning my study, organising my notes and working out what I need to do by when. By the end of the exercise I realise I’ve taken too long and it is time for bed, which of course then requires me to update and alter my study timetable.
Facebook is tool of the devil as far as procrastination is concerned! Blogs in general, and I read a lot, or I let the general goings on of my household distract me (two small children and SO so plenty of distraction opportunities). My advice people wanting to embark on a PhD, don’t have babies and defer and go part-time, otherwise it can take forever. Actually at my uni atleast the rules for candidature are no longer as accommodating as they were when I enrolled, so it is a lot harder to take longer than the equivalent to four full time and they are really pushing people to get their theses done in three.
I should have put the words ‘years’ up there behind the numbers four and three
All the word games on Facebook – Scrabulous, Word Twist, Text Twirkl, etc. Wonderful procrastination devices. As is Google reader, for reading my blog subscriptions.
“I feel guilty if I’m not doing something vaguely related to my study, so I spend long hours planning my study, organising my notes and working out what I need to do by when. By the end of the exercise I realise I’ve taken too long and it is time for bed, which of course then requires me to update and alter my study timetable.”
Ah yes, organising rather than actually doing. That’s a good one. I spent a couple years of being totally disorganised, and then went the other way and started organising to the nth degree. Three months from submission and I think I’ve got the balance right. I may have to make one more list though. Just one, I swear
My favourite form of thesis procrastination at the moment is to take something that IS relevant to the research and then follow it further than its importance demands. My latest is to read all of H M Green’s History of Australian Literature when it is just the stuff on descriptive writers (in the 1923-1950 volume) that is relevant. Green was awesome, BTW, (as was his wife Dorothy). You really can’t go past him for an introductory text to Australian literary history to 1950. His is a very broad version of the category ‘literature’.
Not studying this semester, but work procrastination can involve creative program compiling (i.e. looking for obscure warnings and fixing them, then recompiling entire project again). While it’s compiling, do a little blogging.
A variant is “long SQL query tuning” – find your longest running SQL statement and run it endlessly in the query analyser to work out what’s wrong with it. Tweak it a bit, do it again.
It isn’t entirely procrastination, but it’s not terribly productive either. Oops, that query just finished, time to tweak it…
I find I suddenly need to explore my inner creative chef, and need to create gourmet meals for morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, supper, and multiple snacks.
Of course, having done so, I find it very important to take the dog on long walks to undo to the calories.
Then having worked so hard, I really really need to play solitare.
If I want to punish myself for the fact that I’m procrastinating, I do some cruel and unusual form of housework, like getting up the ladder to take down the curtains and wash them. Otherwise, blogging, word games and crime fiction.
Klaus K, there was a memorable ASAL conference (Sydney 1988, I think) at which the redoubtable Dorothy Green sang a couple of the songs written by Henry Handel Richardson. You would have loved it — though probably not at the age you were at the time.
“If I want to punish myself for the fact that I’m procrastinating, I do some cruel and unusual form of housework”
Heh. I cleaned the oven last week for exactly that reason.
GW and Klaus K seem to have reinvented the Arnold J. Rimmer method of study preparation …
I wish I could’ve been there, Dr Cat.
I’ve just been reading Green on ‘the Critic’, actually, and now consider my ‘new humanities’-trained self duly chastised. On the other hand, I may never have read either of the Greens if I hadn’t been led to them by Meaghan Morris.
I cook, and pick up toys. A friend whose procrastination thing was cleaning was once sprung by his housemates having moved all the lounge room furniture onto the front lawn so he could clean more thoroughly.
I did rearrange most of the furniture in the house in order to get my study ‘just right’ about a month ago.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
You’d have to mow the lawn first too!
That’s just sick.
If we’d done that we would have found the dead rat that was there for quite a while (Good god child, will you stop doing those revolting farts?” “It wasn’t meeeee!”)
cruel and unusual form of housework
*snorts coffee through nose*
I am actually in the middle of a huge and boring task at this moment, so I’d better get back to it.
Have you moved to Wollstonecraft, Helen?
/sorry, couldn’t resist
This thread is making me feel a lot better about my slack self. Tis a comfort to know that I am not the only one who plays convoluted mind games with oneself in order to get properly organised and ready for study.
When I was doing my MA, the inte5net had hardly srarted, and back then I was a bit of a technophobe. I was living in college and I had to see my supervisor once a week, report on my reading, the way my ideas were developing, what progress I was making with note taking, and when I was in Sydney and Canberra in the various libraries and archives, write a weekly letter, which he always replied to on what I found. When I’d done all the research, I had to write a chapter a fortnight to be submitted for comment, then rewtite, rewrite, rewrite taking the comments into account.
Nevertheless, I did discover various procrastination techniques. Having long conversation with friends on anything but the thesis topic; watching endless videos; once going to the country music festival in Tamworth; getting pissed every Wednesday night (with 20 other college inmates); writing a conference paper and a couple of articles published on the thesis, (including one on fiction related to the topic which didn’t go into the thesis).
Nowadays, operating as an indepedent historian with no deadline because I keep put off telling my publisher I’m writing the book so I don’t get one, my main procrastination techniques are blogging, reading books only distantly related to the topic, not regularly buying system cards so I can take a day or two off per fortnight, spending a week at uni now and then photocopying any article that looks vaguely relevant, taking pension day off every fortnight; and doing book reviews. Nevertheless, I discipline myself to do a minimum of related reading or note taking for 3 hours a day (except pension day. I also procrastinate by endlessly tinkering with the finished ptologue and partly completed first chapter.
A big procrastination is looming, as I’ve been asked to write a book about an Aboriginal kid who survived a dreadful life-threatening illness, (with the co-operation of the family) and am considering taking it up.
“If I want to punish myself for the fact that I’m procrastinating, I do some cruel and unusual form of housework”
I got really fit during the end period of my PhD. Having run the gamut of pointless procrastination, I started in with swimming, running and cycling. During particularly painful chapters, I was damn near doing a triathalon a day.
reorganising my vinyl or CD collection, “oh look I haven’t played this for ages, I’ll just have a wee listen then I’ll get cracking”. Hours later….
I find myself with the strange urge to have a shower five times a day.
rf – I hear you.
Most of my procrastination activities are themselves subject to further procrastination. I can’t even slack off efficiently.
What if I write this now and later find some obscure but crucial paper that will mean I’ll have to go back and re do the whole thing?
I’ll just do another search on Web of Knowledge and … oooh, look what’s in my feed reader.
Cups of tea and coffee.
And I wonder why I get into fights on the internet so enthusiastically.
Liam,does tending the beret/hat collection get a look in too?
For myself – well it has been a long time since I had to submit an essay or thesis but if there is a task to complete I find playing with our dog is a first necessary step.
Or giving him a brush , a treat , or walk. Or playing fetch.And so on!
Weeding the lawn. Contemplation on the verandah with coffee, after breakfast, after first cup of coffee, after a lie down, after weeding in the afternoon, after walking over to the other side of the paddock to see why that cow’s mooing. Reading blog posts comments.
I have been procrastinating for so long now I have completely forgotten whatever it was I started many moons ago. Oh well, it can’t have been all that important.
Yes, those last few months are killers. But since I would rather have worked on the PhD than deliberately indulge in any form of exercise apart from swimming or dancing, my equivalent was to spend a lot of time at the piano. I learned the whole first movement of the Moonlight Sonata so thoroughly that I can still play it even after all this time.
Cleaning the fridge.
I was inspired to finish my PhD when I found I had twins on the way.
I procrastinate from my professional occupation of blog commenting by writing a thesis.
Re David @ #13,
I was just thinking the same thing as I wrote it, but I didn’t think anyone would get the obscure Red Dwarf comparison though… clearly I underestimated the sci-fi credentials of the LP crowd.
You know blogging isn’t procrastination, it’s sharpening up my ability to think/write on my feet and to get my point across succinctly! So you know, I’m really doing work towards the thesis when I visit the blogosphere, really.
There is a tee shirt somewhere on the internet which says “procrastination is crack for writers”.
Metafilter is pretty good. And cooking. And polishing up my paralysing dread caused by stuff I haven’t done.
I think there is only one task in my entire life at which I have not become a champion procrastinator. I was premature.
I have actually turned procrastinating into Teh Positive Force for Good. All my most creative work is done while avoiding something horrible.
To be serious for a moment – my psychological trick is to keep forgetting stuff I need to do, including forgetting to look at the list on which I put the things I mustn’t forget, until I am ready to go to bed. Then I realise I have to do this stuff before I sleep and so I am up until four am in the morning, which means I am stuffed when I get to work next day, only a very few hours later.. which means I forget stuff I need to do… etc.
Etc could be my middle name.