Fun With Procrastination

Two weeks late (naturally) for National Procrastination Week (Mar. 1-7), here are some fun diversions, toys and tools for fellow procrastinators.

1.  The Task Juggler, By Dan Alcantara  


This is a gadget you can add to your iGoogle homepage, if you have one.  You list tasks that need to be done, and then activate the juggler.  This part electronic nag, part timer will present you with a randomly selected task to work on for ten minutes, then instruct you to take a two minute break before tackling another randomly selected task for ten minutes, etc.  I have this handy little item on my homepage, but find it all too easy to ignore as I cover it with active windows on my computer screen.  It needs an auditory signal to let the user know when to switch between tasks and breaks.  For those of us who are somewhat oppositional, it can be one more authority figure to resist.

2.  365 Days of Procrastination Daily Planner 2010 Planner

 

Here's the product description, which says it all:

The essential guide for both seasoned procrastinators and those still mastering the art of slacking off. Whether you're a seasoned procrastinator or still mastering the art of slacking off this daily planner pad is the ultimate tool for reducing efficiency. A complete waste of time in and of itself, it is guaranteed to help you accomplish the minimum amount of work in the maximum amount of time.

3.   The Procrastinator Website's Timewasting Page

This page offers "online activities that have been designed specifically to waste as much of your valuable time as possible."


Check out the rest of this clever site if you still have time.

4. Wall Poster  

The site offering this somewhat depressing product allows you to change the wording and add your own image, in case you are reform-minded.  


5. T-shirt 

The headless model of this rumpled garment looks like a procrastinator to me!

6.  Procrastinator's Watch 

Though the image is a bit cartoonish, this is a real watch that you can order and wear, if your schedule is more approximate than precise.


More products like this are available from (where else?) Procrastination.com--where the motto is "Procrastination . . . no longer a character flaw, but a lifestyle alternative. . ." 

7.  My You Tube Procrastination Playlist


Something I put together in my spare time.  And there's a lot more where these came from.


Have a great weekend, and try not to do too much.  We'll be back on the horse Monday-ish.

Oh, yeah, Sacred Awe

In her book Broken Open:  How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, Elizabeth Lesser attributes to Albert Einstein the statement that "the most appropriate response to life is Sacred Awe."  I have been unable to verify whether Einstein said this, exactly, though it seems to fit with other things he did say.  But reading these words recently had a strong impact on the way my life felt to me for several days afterward.  And I don't think it matters who uttered them.


For some reason--timing, need, or some other susceptibility--encountering those words at that moment opened my eyes.  Like putting on Avatar's 3-D glasses.   Things around me stood out, things I normally "know" but that blend into the backdrop of my tedious little melodrama.   And the obviousness of the majesty that surrounds me and includes me, and my everyday blindness, was beyond the V-8 head smack realization ("I could have had a V-8!").  More like "Oh, no!  I forgot to have children!"  But bigger.


I was stunned by my failure to notice the enormity, the complexity, and the beauty I inhabit. And my propensity to get lost in the grass of annoyance.   Even my very real sorrow and suffering can't hold a candle to this world, in which Avatar, with its visual splendor and compelling society, is just one of many visions.  How can any sunrise not command my attention?  How do I numb myself to the sense of astonishment called out in the presence of a small child's learning?  Or the perfect arrangement of my dog's fur?  Or all the moments in a stranger's life?  Or birdsong?  Or government?  This laptop. . . .


For those several days that followed this realization, my equilibrium was restored.  My priorities were shifted.  My perspective was new.  My heart was calmed and my spirit enlivened.  When I tried to communicate this understanding to others, I sounded like a simpleton.  Because it is simple.  


Maybe this is what Buddha meant by awakening.  But, in my experience, it is hard to stay awake.  Easy to slip back into the familiar absorption in to do lists and worrying, and all the other inappropriate responses to the universe we routinely make.  The awakened view remains for me as one of the many channels I can tune to.  It's "programming" is in HD, but the reception is iffy.  


But Sacred Awe is the appropriate context for this "recovery tale," and for all our stories.  It shouldn't be that hard to remember.  

Let's Schedule a Meeting About All These *(&*$@%~ Meetings

When my now-grown daughter was in preschool, her three closest friends were always going to meetings.  While the other three-year-olds were building towers, driving trucks and  bossing baby dolls around, these girls were rehearsing for a life in the League of Women Voters, like their mothers.  That life, as far as they could tell, consisted of going early, and going often, to meetings.  Their busy calendars directed them to frequent departures and constant assemblies.  The scripts for these gatherings were simple and predictable, calling for sitting down around a table or a living room, and talking.  Drinking coffee, and talking.  Talking, and talking.  These girls had never heard of Peter Drucker.


To Peter Drucker, who penned his classic The Effective Executive in 1967, meetings are a symptom of what he terms "malorganization."

Meetings are by definition a concession to a deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One can not do both at the same time.

I am not a member of the League of Women Voters, though I might have been seen as a fellow traveller of that esteemed organization at one time. I don't know if any of the three young women who were once so eager to rise to its ranks ever did so.  But I bet that wherever they are, and whatever they are doing, they, like me, are attending their fair share of meetings.  Because, as Drucker warned,

[T]here will always be more than enough meetings…Every meeting generates a host of little follow-up meetings—some formal, some informal, but both stretching out for hours.

And, while I have been pointing to attendance at meetings, and scheduling more, as "achievements" in my weekly "Done for the Week" lists, I am thinking about rethinking this.  Maybe the fifty-plus hours I have spent in meetings in the last ten weeks, in addition to the twenty-plus hours spent travelling to and from what Drucker identifies as time-wasters, are a clue to the paucity of other accomplishments on those lists.

In my defense, I am more a passive than an active participant in scheduling all these meetings.  They are generated by two entities, and their offshoots, which have come to be important to me.  One is the Unitarian Universalist church I belong to.  UUs are famous for meeting, and for coffee, as seen in this much-circulated UU "joke:"

What would cause a crisis of faith in a Unitarian? Offering one a choice between coffee hour and a discussion of coffee hour!

I'm probably not going to do much to change the culture of a denomination, so my only hope is to continue to avoid additional long-term committee membership, and election to office.  (Since I've been pressed into service at past annual meetings as the quasi-self-trained parliamentarian, I can always rule my nomination out of order, as a last ditch measure.)  


The other, and most egregious, meeting-spawner in my life is a nonprofit social justice organization of congregations to which my church belongs.  In this organization, I wear so many hats, I feel like Bartholomew Cubbins (of the 500 hats).  And each of these head coverings comes with its own endless round of--you guessed it--m-e-e-t-i-n-g-s.  Even though Drucker told us, forty-three years ago, that

above all, meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule. An organization where everybody meets all the time is an organization in which no one gets anything done. Wherever a time log shows the fatty degeneration of meetings—whenever, for instance people in an organization find themselves in meetings a quarter of their time or more—there is time-wasting malorganization.

Recent weeks have seen task forces, subcommittees and "collaboratives" generating sub-subcommittees and offshoots, like so many headless worm segments.  Or like the brooms and buckets of the sorcerer's apprentice.  The musical score of this way-way-off Broadway production communicates the same frenzy of Disney's version of that old tale, where Mickey bravely battles the resulting currents, but in vain.
It may just be time, in the interests of productivity, to go on a meeting diet.  Or maybe, even though we're halfway through, and even though I'm a Unitarian, I could give them up for Lent.

Procrastinating 101: Now for Some Good News

Poking around in the procrastination "literature" available on the web, I stumbled upon the intriguing term "positive procrastination."  Maybe it's in my stars--I'm a Libra--but I've always tended to be a balancer, one to advocate looking at things from an opposing perspective.  And not surprisingly, I am especially prone to such examination when the mainstream view is damning of me and my behaviors.  So I'm drawn to the notion that my years of procrastinating have not all been negative.


The most frequently cited work in this vein is a 2005 academic article by Angela Hsin Chun Chu and Jin Nam Choi.  Chu and Choi identified two types of procrastinators (again with the numbers, and the types!)--passive (in layman's terms, "bad"), and active ("good"). The way I read their findings and analysis, I have been both.


The passive procrastinator is the one we all know, and some of us love, from the many texts and columns and talk shows who would repair this individual.  Said passive procrastinator, in Chu and Choi's summary of the literature, is "lazy or self-indulgent" and "unable to self-regulate."  Procrastination of this type "has been considered a self-handicapping behavior that leads to wasted time, poor performance, and increased stress."


Chu and Choi's more nuanced inquiry seems to have grown from two main sources.  First is the work of Dianne Tice and Roy Baumeister, whose longitudinal study of procrastination, published in 1997, identified "costs and benefits of dawdling."  Tice and Baumeister's research concluded that "[p]rocrastinators may find that they feel better and are healthier when the deadline is far off and they postpone the task."  This benefit was short-term, however, and the usual chickens of stress and poor performance eventually came home to roost, in their study.  Chu and Choi also point to the argument of procrastination guru William Knaus.  Knaus hints at the possible functionality of some procrastination, pointing to time spent gathering information and preparing as being, in some cases, well spent.  He advances the position of many procrastinators, often deemed rationalization, that they "work better under pressure."  


Our friends Chu and Choi thus posited their two types of procrastinators.  Active procrastinators differ from their passive cousins in cognitive, affective and behavioral characteristics.  In plain English, these "good" procrastinators decide to put something off, they can live with time pressure, and they complete work by the deadline.  Chu and Choi conclude that 

although active procrastinators procrastinate to the same degree as passive procrastinators, they are more similar to nonprocrastinators than to passive procrastinators in terms of purposive use of time, control of time, self-efficacy belief, coping styles, and outcomes . . .

So what does this mean for us procrastinators, good and bad?  What I'm taking from it is that procrastination can be a tool, to be used selectively.  But it can't be our only approach, or the default position.  "If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail."  Today, I'm going to decide what to put off, deal with the pressure, and complete what I can.