Procrastination

One summer during my undergraduate studies, I came up with some ideas that I thought might make some witty t-shirts about procrastination. Just now, as I was procrastinating, I came across a blog entry by Aaron Swartz that describes procrastination in a unique way that I think is right on target:

[Y]our brain puts up a sort of mental force field around a task. Ever play with two magnets? If you orient the magnets properly and try to push them towards each other, they'll repel fiercely. As you move them around, you can sort of feel out the edges of the magnetic field. And as you try to bring the magnets together, the field will push you back or off in another direction.

He goes on to say how a mental block is just like magnetic repulsion in this way - the more you focus your energy on getting around to that task, the harder it becomes, and the sneakier you have to be to accomplish the task. He also hypothesizes that the mental force field of procrastination is caused by the task being hard or assigned.

I also think the amount of time left in which you have to do the task plays a major role in procrastination behavior. Right now, I have the whole weekend ahead of me, in which I would like to get many things done, but none of them seem pressing enough quite yet for me to dig in. This is a great contrast to earlier in the semester when I had so much going on that I often remained in the library until late night on weekends. It's nice to be able to afford some procrastinatory internet browsing. It can be quite fulfulling.

Facebook doesn't know how happy they just made me - and reflections on graduate school

One of the main problems lately with facebook has been the mass amounts of application invitations and other such visual spam. Once again, facebook has come to the rescue a few months later with a way to block all the notifications and messages from an application.
Now I can resume my hectic grad school life with an occasional hiatus to Scrabulous without Zombies attacks distracting me. Hooray!

In other news, as evidenced by my lack of posting for several months, graduate school has certainly taken over my life. I am involved in many projects and I am learning a lot and enjoying my time spent here. Campus is beautiful and the weather has stayed warm later in the year than I expected. One of the opportunities I have enjoyed since I have moved here was attending ArbCamp which was a community event with keynote speaker Joseph Jaffe of the internet marketing oriented blog Jaffe Juice. I met many interesting members of the community and talked about social computing, privacy, and web design. I am excited to have a signed copy now of Jaffe's new book, Join the Conversation. In the conversations about social networking, I was very surprised by the number of people subscribing to microblogging services like Twitter and Pownce. Perhaps people strongly connected by their college associations prefer Facebook, whereas those finding facebook too cluttered enjoy the brevity of micro-posts. The issue of critical mass in adoption may be the main deciding factor in who uses one social tool over another. In any case, I think it would be really interesting to see a study on demographics of these various tools over time, to see if it is just the rise and fall of trends with certain populations always being the first adopters or if the population using the tool has more to do with the nature of the tool.

I will post more about my first semester, but it may not be until Winter break. Until then, my first priority is surviving and thriving in my newfound environment.