Procrastination

The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, because one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that these tasks are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deception skills. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the negative effects of another?

Jack Perry Brown, Procedural Guide to Automating an Art Library, edited by Patricia J. Barnett and Amy E. Lucker. Tucson, Arizona: ARLIS/NA, 1987. 40p. (Occasional Papers of the Art Libraries Society of North America no. 7). ISBN 0-942740-06-8. $15.00., Art Libraries Journal, vol. 13, no. 3, 1988, pp. 28–29, p. 7

Nothing so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

William James, The letters of William James, Boston, 1920, p. 249

A good rule of thumb to ask yourself in all situations is, “If not now, then when?” Many people delay important habits, work and goals for some hypothetical future. But the future quickly becomes the present and nothing will have changed.

Bernadette Young, Parenthood and effective altruism, Effective Altruism Forum, April 13, 2014

[A] man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

Hunter Thompson, Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, San Francisco, 2014, p. 67

What /must /be done, Sir, /will /be done.

Samuel Johnson, Life of Mr Richard Savage, London, 1744, p. 108

Picture this: You sit down at your computer to write a report that’s due the next day. You fire up a web browser to check the company intranet for a document. For a split second, you glance at your home page. “Wow!” you say. “The Red Sox won in the 17th inning! Let me see what happened…”

Three hours later, no report’s been written, and you want to throw yourself out of the window.

Sound familiar?

It’s too easy to scamper down the rabbit hole of the Web when you’ve gt pressing tasks to work on. At one point or another, you’ve probably burned a few hours clicking around Wikipedia, Amazon.com, eBay, Flickr, YouTube, or Google News when you had a deadline to meet. Surfing efficiently is an exercise in discipline and sometimes outright abstinence. This hack uses the LeechBlock Firefox extension to blank out certain web sites during times you’re supposed to be working. […]

[A] particularly determined procrastinator might say, “If it’s a block I can disable, I’ll do it.” If you find yourself blocked from a time-wasting site that you insist on visiting (and to hell with your deadline), you could go into LeechBlock’s options and undo the block. However, LeechBlock comes with a clever feature built to prevent just that. In LeechBlock’s options dialog, check off “Prevent access to options for this block set at times when these sites are blocked.”

Gina Trapani, Upgrade your life: The Lifehacker guide to working smarkter, faster, better, Indianapolis, 2008, pp. 140-141