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Procrastination 501January 16, 2008 My procrastination technique hit the graduate level about 25 years ago, when I realized that I was writing in order to avoid writing. In the years since, I've developed a general approach to procrastination that goes something like this: Procrastination is neither a character defect nor a bad habit. Procrastination is a fact of life, like curly hair and funky vision and having a dog with a mind of his own. Since the route to a satisfactorily completed project very often isn't a straight line -- think "sailing" here: if you insist on heading straight for your destination, you'll wind up in irons and start drifting backwards -- it's much better to work with Procrastination than to try to break off the relationship. You'll get more done, and you'll waste less time beating yourself up. Don't rush to sort procrastination methods into "good" and "bad" either. Sure, baking bread looks more virtuous than, say, playing another game of cyber-solitaire, and it's true, having something to eat at the end of the journey is a major plus, but if you intuit the sound of one hand clapping while playing FreeCell, who's to say it was a waste of time? So a few days ago I started feeling an occasional raspy itch in the back of my throat, and Rhodry was dry-coughing more than usual. After dismissing several options, like we'd simultaneously contracted sudden-onset bronchitis, pneumonia, or lung cancer, I arrived that the hypothesis that maybe (it being winter 'n' all, and the windows all closed) the problem was dry air. Aha! Something I could fix! My Rinnai heater has a humidifier tray at the bottom. If I poured some water into it, the moisture would circulate around the room and reach into our throats and help us breathe better. The cause was so noble that I set to it immediately, without no thought of procrastination -- until I ascertained that one end of the cover you have to remove to get to the humidifier tray was blocked by the leftward of the two file cabinets that supports my desktop. The cabinet could be pushed rightward enough to free the cover, but since the desktop supports Morgana V and I believe that jostling a computer can lead to very bad karma, I deferred the project till Morgana was asleep. Last night I heard Rhodry coughing and my throat felt dry, so this morning I set to it. While Morgana slept, I cleared my way to the heater: moved desk chair, typing table, the little maple table the scanner sits on, and the small easy chair that serves as a phone stand and a resting place for both clothes and papers, dodging cords and cables all the way. Then I tried to shoulder the file cabinet a bit to the right. It would not budge. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness, etc., etc., so I removed both (full) drawers and set them on the bed. Once again I crouched down and set shoulder to the file cabinet: poco a poco it moved. (My mother used to say "Poco a poco se anda mucho," little by little one makes great progress, and the phrase never pops into my head without my thinking, If only she'd been able to take her own good advice.) The cover came off easily. The humidifier tray took some wrestling to get out. It looked dusty and parched so of course I had to wash both parts, top and bottom, in the sink, and equally of course I didn't make note of how they fit together. Turns out they fit together in several plausible ways, only one of which will allow them to slide back into their cave. While I figured this out, much grunting and cussing and gnashing of teeth was heard, or would have been heard had there been someone around to hear it (Rhodry was asleep on the deck), and of course the superstitious part of my brain was convinced that in the process of jiggling the tray loose I was going to break the heater and maybe the gas line would blow up and kill us all. The smartest thing I did was to not pour water into the tray till I was sure I had it in right; otherwise the rug would have been soaked and the grunting and cussing far worse than it was. Setting everything to rights took far less time than messing it up, and Morgana woke up without incident. If she had any bad dreams while I was rattling her foundations, she hasn't let me know. It took about an hour to do the job -- I left out the part where I found a plug adapter on the desk that wasn't in use so I went to put it in the cords-and-cables drawer but the drawer wouldn't open easily because there was so much junk in it so I had to go through it all, throwing out several uselessly short phone cords and taming the cords and cables worth keeping with twist ties -- and another hour to write about it. Now my oatmeal's almost ready, moisture is wafting through the air, and I'm ready to go to work.
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