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.