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December 26, 2005
More procrastination
While out riding, I thought more about Paul Graham's essay on procrastination. He's right about good procrastination being that you, "work on ... something more important," than the other things you could be doing with your time.
But I couldn't figure out how you decide what's important. Paul says you should drop the small stuff:
What's "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary.
That's good in the sense that it fits for things like TV watching. Don't tell the kids yet that they don't have to go to school anymore. Maybe they shouldn't, but they might not come to the decision about careful reflection on their own obituaries...
...or about whether doing things that get into a eulogy are also procrastination, eulogies being governed by conventions and what we think other people would think is proper. Doing things you think other people will think was proper sounds to me like travel on the road to hell paved with good intentions. Paul writes of "the most dangerous form of procrastination" being getting a lot of the wrong things done. He leads back to the big question:
What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?
He ends up suggesting, "Let delight pull you." Dad used to suggest that I aim to do work I enjoy; Paul is suggesting that work also be ambitious.
So far my work, like the rest of my life, is the dangerous type of procrastination.
Posted by Mark at December 26, 2005 06:42 PM
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