Tag: procrastination

~ Mark

You don’t realize how much of your sense of self is bound up in how you use your time until you have a lot of it.

Max Read in Milling Time.

Structured Procrastination: Do Less & Deceive Yourself

~ Mark

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

cough. Filed under: procrastination.

Structured Procrastination: Do Less & Deceive Yourself

~ Mark

Percentage wise, it is 100% easier not to do things than to do them, and so much fun not to do them—especially when you were supposed to do them. In terms of instant relief, canceling plans is like heroin.

John Mulaney.
~ Mark

heidisaman:

“Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man. It is a noisy, physical apparatus; it is difficult to concentrate—and you have to do it from eight-thirty to six-thirty, five days a week. It’s not an environment an artist would ever choose to work in. The only advantage it has is that you must do it, and you can’t procrastinate…”

— Stanley Kubrick on making films

Photo of Kubrick on the set of Barry Lyndon via a certain cinema

The Net Is a Waste of Time – New York Times

~ Mark

I stay in. Hooked. Is this leisure – this browsing, randomly linking my way through these small patches of virtual real-estate – or do I somehow imagine that I am performing some more dynamic function? The content of the Web aspires to absolute variety. One might find anything there. It is like rummaging in the forefront of the collective global mind. Somewhere, surely, there is a site that contains … everything we have lost?

Oldie but a goodie. William Gibson in 1996.

Today, in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however many monitors in that postgeographical meta-country we increasingly call home. It will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun — we seem to have a knack for that — but in the meantime, in its gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes phase, surfing the Web is a procrastinator’s dream. And people who see you doing it might even imagine you’re working.

The Net Is a Waste of Time – New York Times

~ Mark

Most of my days involve four- and five-hour stretches of what I would characterize as dicking around on the Internet.

Jesse Thorn. (via)

The Searchers: Radiohead’s unquiet revolution – The New Yorker

~ Mark

Alex Ross on tour with Radiohead. I like this bit from Nigel Godrich on Radiohead’s ongoing effort to figure out their sound and musical directions. At one point,

People stopped talking to one another. ‘Insanity’ is the word. In the end, I think the debate was redundant, because the band ultimately kept doing what it has always done—zigzagging between extremes. Whenever we really did try to impose an aesthetic from the outside—the aesthetic being, say, electronic—it would fail. All the drama was just a form of procrastination.

The Searchers: Radiohead’s unquiet revolution – The New Yorker

~ Mark

The first strong external revelation of the Dry Rot in men, is a tendency to lurk and lounge; to be at street-corners without intelligible reason; to be going anywhere when met; to be about many places rather than at any; to do nothing tangible, but to have an intention of performing a variety of intangible duties to-morrow or the day after.

Charles Dickens in his essay, “Night Walks”.