Bored? You probably are. You are reading a blog after all. I bet you’re even supposed to be doing something else right now, something that someone is probably paying you to do. Reading my blog at work? Shame on you! (No, not really, keep reading!)
I was sitting through yet another lecture at IUPUI and it hit me, rather hard, that I was bored. This came as a frightening revelation because I was sitting in a classroom full of my peers in the future of Informatics. If I’m bored by the topics of my degree, does that mean that I’ll be bored later in that chosen career? I wonder how many of you were bored in the classes pertaining to your chosen degree program. Did you stop to ask yourself if you were doing the right thing?
“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.” – Jessica Hische
So that brings me to the other half of the title “The Art of Procrastination.” What do you do when you are procrastinating? I bet some, especially those over-worked perfectionists, would say “nothing” because that’s precisely what they see procrastination as. I see procrastination much as Jessica does, a window to what you’d rather be doing. Doctors tell us all the time to listen to our bodies because they know best. For the same reason you feel bloated and ill after spending the night at your local pub plowing down fried bar food, you’ll likewise feel wasted, drained, and otherwise unfulfilled at the job and classes you don’t care for.
I find that when I’m procrastinating, I’m really thinking. I’m thinking about what to write about, thinking about the novel in progress, thinking how that villain is going to interact with my main character and why the object of the novel is willing to die for something that he just acquired. I think that’s enough about the novel, just buy it when it comes out. You’ll understand later and hopefully thank me for not spoiling it!
So, in a way, procrastination is an art form, an exercise in self-expression that many of us fail to recognize for what it’s worth. I admit that my procrastination isn’t always productive. However, more often than not, it is, even if it is as simple as working out a plan or a solution to a pending problem. When people ask why I procrastinate and wait until the last minute to do an assignment (for class mind you, my work ethics are much better, I swear!) I often tell them that I “work better under pressure” and it’s true that a certain amount of stress and a deadline will force anyone to crap out an example of work. It’s never your best work and no matter how many A’s my professors kindly give me, we’ll both know that I am capable of better. The problem isn’t that it needs to be better; the problem is that my mind is telling me what you may have already gathered. My heart belongs to something other than Informatics. My heart belongs to my writing.
What does your procrastination produce? What should you be doing?