Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Procrastination

There was an interesting article today on Science Daily about procrastination.
Date: January 10, 2007
...

"Essentially, procrastinators have less confidence in themselves, less expectancy that they can actually complete a task," Steel says. "Perfectionism is not the culprit. In fact, perfectionists actually procrastinate less, but they worry about it more."

Other predictors of procrastination include: task aversiveness, impulsiveness, distractibility, and how much a person is motivated to achieve. Not all delays can be considered procrastination; the key is that a person must believe it would be better to start working on given tasks immediately, but still not start.

Oops, did I say today? I meant three weeks ago. I also meant to write about it three weeks ago, but I wasn't sure that I had anything constructive to add to the conversation. Now I've finally decided that I have something to say, hence this post. Not only have I ended my procrastination on this specific topic, but I'll be cutting back on stalling altogether for a while (or at least try). I'm throwing down the gauntlet!

February will be "new blog post per day month." That's right, every day (not just Fridays) I will post some new material. Starting tomorrow February 1st, here's the rules I'm imposing on myself:

  • Every day I will put up at least one new post.
  • At least one post each day must have a minimum of five sentences of original content.
  • The penalty for skipping will be 2^n original posts in one day (n = # of days where I violate one of these rules).

So basically, I can't just post a link or embed a video unless I include 5 sentences of commentary or have another post which is compliant. It shouldn't be that hard to pull this off. I've got a few ideas for some posts, but I imagine that most will be hurried ejaculations of whatever is on my mind. Not bad for a reworking of a failed New Year's resolution, eh? Maybe I'll even get around to resurrecting the nascent and comatose Science Pundit podcast.

Let the fun begin!

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