no tears, no fears
no ruined years, no clocks
see, what’s interesting about this post is that i’m writing it the day of. just writing along. today’s post is about procrastination. it’s funny because that’s what i’m doing.
those of you who frequent my little corner of the internet might know i have a hate-hate relationship with procrastination. i do not like it. i don’t enjoy watching my grades drop. i do not like green eggs and ham, i do not like them sam-i-am.¹
procrastination is a killer catch-22.² you know that the work needs to get done, but you cannot do it due to some irrational restriction of the mind. you get two choices: try to do the work or just don’t bother.
if you don’t bother then it’s the path of least resistance. if you try, you will likely fail due to a distraction i.e. social media or hunger or someone coming to bother you. once you are off task, it’s hard to claw your way back and you fall off into the same outcome as if you never tried. you understand the problem here yes?
so what’s the solution? we can’t reach for the sky as we’d fall right back into the loop. if we go bare minimum then it’s the path of least resistance once again, and nothing happens. so here’s what happens. we go slightly above the bare minimum. not high enough to never start, not low enough so that we don’t have to try anything.
our goal has to be a s.m.a.r.t. one. wait an acronym NOOOOOO-
- specific
- measurable
- actionable
- responsible
- time-bounded
your goal has to be specific. you cannot clean the whole house, but you can pick up that laundry pile and move it into a basket.
it has to be measurable, in that a difference is noticeable.
it has to be actionable, which is something you can do right now.
it has to be responsible, something that is an actual goal rather then “i will play an 80 round game of btd6”
and something that’s time-bound, something with a reasonable time limit. you cannot get anything done if you want to do it in two months.
and most of all, you cannot lie to yourself. you must be able to acknowledge the problem.
this post has become very serious and i’m not really happy about that so we’re going to go on a sudden tangent about trains and then an outro.
so trains. they go chugga chugga. maybe even choo choo. they are better than cars in every way and the fact that we went for the interstate system is a shame. you can sleep on a train or have tea on the train all the while going up to 110 an hour. faster than cars! and you can have more people on a train than in a car!
people complain about high speed rail being too expensive to put throughout the country. but counterpoint. the highway act of 1956. we dropped twenty-five billion dollars to build forty-four thousand miles of road. some of those roads are more neglected then the 9 key on your microwave.
if we did it before, then we can do it again. i want trains. ok bye.
1: wow i really did put that in here. hmm. clearly i am mentally stable.
2: am reading this right now. catch-22 is a very good book.