Progress is something I can always work on tomorrow
February 2, 2005 | 5:08 pm | Blog | Writing | 0
I’m a procrastinator. It sucks, but as a result I’ve learned that I work far, far better under pressure. If I have too much time to do something, I will tinker with it and tinker with it and eventually all the original charm of it will have worn off it now it’s just too perfect and sterile to be worth anything. If I’m short on time — on deadline, say, I will work my fingers off.
I received this training in college, and by “received,” I mean I trained my own mind and body to act this way because I was usually goofing off ‘til the last minute anyway.
I encounter this a lot at work too. All day long, when I’m supposed to be writing about how the fire department at Pleasantville is short half their staff because all those men have taken up the cause to fight in Iraq or how there’s a ribbon cutting at the local olde icee creme shoppe later this afternoon, I’m surfing the Internet. All. Day. Long. I get nothing done.
I mean, I get a little done. As my pal Dr. Pants would say, there are short bursts of extreme productivity surrounded by long periods of goofing off. It possibly could be caused by my OCD, because it usually proceeds like this: write a paragraph here, check my e-mail, check the newspaper, check my e-mail again, check my favorite blogs, write another paragraph, check my e-mail again in case someone sent something to me in the past three minutes.
The whole purpose of this post is simply to say that, for the past few days, I’ve been working on a computer without Internet access, and I’ve got a lot of writing done. I’ve possibly done more work in the past three days than I did in the entire month of December.
I mean, just look at how long this post is. 328 words, when all I really should have written was the was the previous paragraph.