Procrastination
Paul Graham has some wonderful things to say about the nature of procrastination in his latest article:
There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I’d argue, is good procrastination.
That’s the “absent-minded professor,” who forgets to shave, or eat, or even perhaps look where he’s going while he’s thinking about some interesting question. His mind is absent from the everyday world because it’s hard at work in another.
That’s the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They’re type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.
I like this formulation a lot, because it kind of makes me feel better about myself. Whenever I make the mistake of peering into the blurry glass of my memory, I realize just how little there is that I actually do outside of work. I have free time and big plans, so why doesn’t anything ever get done?
Maybe this is why: I have some huge grandiose uber-thingy going on that’s squeezing everything else out; I’m working on something that’s going to make a big impact on the world, and I don’t have time to waste on worthless little things like planning vacations or finishing up old story drafts or learning Ruby on Rails or cleaning out the garage or caulking up the cracks in my walls.
The only thing I need to do now is figure out exactly what that big thing is, and I’ll be all set.
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