I want to point out how much a person can accomplish avoiding something else. At work, I have finished projects and started others in the hope that the Performance Appraisal I have to do, not anyone's favorite thing as far as I know, disappears. Sorry, that doesn't happen. It, like taxes, lurks in the background waiting for your sense of panic to kick in. There are different levels of procrastination. Only the most profound level of accomplishment is truely "Procrastination As A Work Ethic".
Level 1: Avoidance through Media. This is the lowest level, since it rarely accomplishes anything but passing the time. Also useful when you are too tired from real work to do anything else, this procrastination technique can accomplish nothing in hours, even days of your life that would otherwise mean something. The top (or bottom) rung of avoidance through media is watching unplanned television with the commercials. No binging and fast forwarding at this level, you aren't selecting something you want to watch as much as trying to find anything to watch. Wandering from show to show, never seeing a whole one, you realize that switching channels does not enable you to avoid commercials. Network have figured this out and they all have their commercials run at the same time. Go ahead and switch channels. It'll do no good.
Level 2: Thank goodness for cable. No commercials and you can watch a show that started ten years ago continuously and only come up for air when you catch up to the present day. Binging selected shows, watching You Tube videos, reading posts on Facebook, playing Solitaire, Candy Crush, Tetris all accomplish nothing while feeling like you are really doing something. You beat the level. You learned how to play the intro from Stairway to Heaven (well, if you actually played guitar). You sent someone a "Happy Birthday" message. You watched someone's comments on a Metallica song, all the while griping about how many times they stop the song to comment. Way to avoid copyright infringement, guys.
As a side note, what is it about us that makes us sit through a movie on TV of something we have sitting on the shelf as a DVD right next to the TV, or can stream for free without commercials. And complain about an interrupted song that we can listen to in its entirety on our phone. Is it "a bird in the hand, is worth two in the bush?" Are we compelled to stop and watch our favorite movie, cut up by commercials, edited for television and censored because it's on NOW?
Level 3: Procrastination as a Work Ethic. I'm not doing what I should be doing, but I'm accomplishing a lot of something else so it isn't really procrastinating. This is an excellent strategy at home and at work. You need to do that performance appraisal by Wednesday so you catch up on email responses, make corrections on a report, do the required reading for training. You accomplished so much today. Just not the work with a deadline. Start a new project. Finish an old one. That perf app will be waiting for you tomorrow and if it's close to the deadline the anxiety will wake you up during the night! So, back to my taxes. So many "procrastinants"* are available. Dishes, laundry, trimming the rose bushes, grocery shopping, vacuuming, mopping, mowing the lawn/shoveling the snow/raking the leaves/weeding, reading the rest of the book, it's only a few pages**. Finishing a blog article.
I have a confession to make. I started this March 5th and it's now March 13th and I still haven't cleaned the bathroom (Hey! no judgements, please!). I have done one page of the tax info sheet.
Was that the dryer? It's after 11:00, a diet coke sounds good. I wonder what I have for lunch. I guess I'll just pay a few bills before I start the taxes again.
EM
*Not a real word. Patent pending.
**See "Sleeping With Bookmarks". "Just one more chapter" at 10:30 pm can allow you to be practically comatose at work the next day after sleeping only 3.5 hours.
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