differo [delay]

Welcome again to the realm of procrastination. Don't worry if you're reading this instead of doing homework or some other responsibility you ought to attend to...because that is exactly the circumstance under which it is written!

I'm not sure if I have justified my procrastination on here before, though.  It's definitely been mentioned before, but not necessarily justified...

So why not justify it now?

But first, a brief history of my relationship with procrastination:

The thing about procrastination is that it is just so natural.  It just happens, and I was therefore exposed to it at a very early age.  In fact, it's healthy for young kids to go out and play and not do homework day in and day out.  Back in the gradeschool days, putting homework and projects off in order to live a happy, healthy childhood is hardly seen as the vice of procrastination. Indeed there are many people advocating for more childhood play time like recess and minimizing the amounts of homework that young kids have to do. They promote these things under the guise of better well-being, mental and physical health, social and attention skills, and just general happiness. We should probably take these things more seriously.

Anyway, early on life was filled with petty procrastination that coagulated every now and again into late-night science fair projects and history presentations.  You know, the kind that you helped your parents procrastinate until the night before it's due, even though you've known about it for at least a month.

This foundation gave way to middle school, where procrastination became revered as an important skill.  I boasted my abilities as a self-proclaimed "pro-crastinator" (I did indeed crastinate professionally) and juggled my classes using many late nights and productivity diluted by social media and instant messaging.  It of course only got worse the more I got away with it. Good times.

In high school, I added the skill of more constant sleep deprivation to this aspect of life.  There was also more of a shift in these years as my responsibilities were put off, not in order to play outside or indulge in frivolities, but because of the sheer load of productive things I was requiring of myself.  This included normal responsible things like a ton of classes, as well as more fun activities like soccer, lacrosse, and choir.  I definitely don't regret any of it, but it meant that many nights I wouldn't get home until 9 or 10 pm, and then I could get started on homework.  I quickly learned how to spend nights cycling between naps and homework, how to cram productivity into the wee hours of the mornings, and how to maximize the use of down time traveling or at practices and rehearsals.

Things in college are, of course, much different.  I don't have such a varied load anymore, in terms of my extra-curriculars and all.  I've largely switched out the structured sports and music for an intense class load and involvement in a handful of related clubs.  I'm still in the category of procrastinating not for fun, but out of necessity to get more pressing assignments done first, even when that means putting off another important task.  But developments such as these have introduced a new justification for my procrastinations.

Mostly because my responsibilities are so focused on one aspect of life (engineering homework...and nothing else), my need for constructive breaks -- things like exercise, hobbies, and maybe even the occasional social encounter -- can much more often fall under the category of  'for sanity' rather than 'for fun'.  Not sure if this is an improvement.  It can be hard to do these things regularly, both due to the schedule and the fact that I get anxious sometimes if I'm not actively working on homework.  But it's still something that is important to me, to do as often as possible.

Because of that, when I find myself with a smidgen of free time (read: non-panicked time; time where I have more than I will need to accomplish the tasks that are due immediately), I have an important decision to make: I can either take advantage of this time and use it to get ahead on things so that they won't be so stressful later on, or I can actually do something fun, as if to treat it as actual free time.

Usually the level of my motivation is the deciding factor here.

But when the motivation doesn't automatically tell me what to do, I can justify it with some logical thinking.

I know that things like homework are going to get done.  There is no way that those things will get pushed off indefinitely and just never get done. They have deadlines and consequences imposed by outside forces.  So the question is not if they will get done, but when.

Now, in terms of using time, I could use two hours to my enjoyment through reading or exercise or something of the type, and then spend two hours doing homework.  I could do both of those activities in any order that I want, and at the end of the day, I will have spent two hours on each.  It's a pretty good deal.  So if they both get done, there's really not much importance as to which goes first.

Because I know that the homework will get done but my hobbies or other tasks of secondary priority don't have the same guarantee, it seems perfectly logical to do things like write or meet up with friends or kick a soccer ball around for a while when I know that there will be adequate time to do the homework later.

Mind you, this doesn't happen often, so I feel even more justified in justifying it.

Plus it gives me an opportunity to show myself that I am more than just a homeworking robot engineering student, which is an important feat.

So we give procrastination a bad rap.  It can very easily become a vice and rob you of time and opportunity, but I think that if it is used with control, it can become a tool of sorts to balance priorities and time management and personal well-being.  It is important to spend time productively, and to spend down time wisely, not vapidly.  You can probably judge whether your procrastination is justifiable by whether or not you make any personal gains from whatever you've done instead of working on that long to-do list we all have.

Whether you decide to tackle your tasks head on or procrastinate productively, don't ever stop living the most that you can.

After all, "time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted time." 

-Marthe Troly-Curtin

mora [wait, time]

You would think that now that it's summer and classes and homework are no longer taking up all my mental real estate, I would have some time to put some good stuff up on the world wide web, no?
Well, evidently, we're both wrong about that time.

So, with my admittance of being lazy with the blog lately, comes a life lesson I learned while in Arkansas:

You only have time for what you make time for.

Ultimately implying that you are in control of your time more than your time is in control of you.  Obviously, there are days and times when life takes you for some unexpected turns and even though you had set apart time to finally read that book or to get the lawn done before it becomes a forest, other things end up happening.  Unexpected priorities take command from time to time, and this is a normal fact of life.  But it's the occasion.

On the regular, you fill your time each day with tasks and obligations and meetings and even sometimes a little sleep.  And each person has to choose what is most important for them to make time for.  And amidst the hectic scheduling and growing to-do lists, we each have a list somewhere of things to get around to, "if I have time".

Well look around! You have time and space all around you.  In fact, you travel through time on a very regular basis.  No matter what, you're always progressing forward, into the future.  Every moment of your life you witness the inexplicable conundrum of the future becoming the present--short-lived, and then slipping into the past.  Doing this, you acquire more and more time behind you.  The more you age, the more time you've had!  You have plenty of time!

The difference, of course, between your run-of-the-mill time traveler (like most of us) and someone who commands time, is what you do with it.

One of the most underutilized resources we have on this planet is ten minutes.

Think about it.  Ten minutes isn't that long of a wait, and you probably wait for about ten minutes several times throughout the day. For the train to come. For the water to boil. For that person you're meeting.  For the customer service representative to take you off hold.  And it's not too big of a deal, because ten minutes really isn't that long of a time.

But once you're using those ten minutes...it somehow becomes much longer than you thought.  You would be amazed at what you can accomplish in ten minutes.  I often am, whenever I remember to stop wasting my life.  If you will get off of Facebook and look at your to-do list, you'll probably find that most of those items would take only a short time.  You could call that lady back about the thing (two days later than you intended to) while you walk to work.  You could write that thank-you note from two weeks ago on your lunch break.  And then write the other one while you're in the car to pick someone up.  You could even write a blog post while you eat your lunch!

Ah.  It feels really good to get this done and stop having it hang over my head.

And the nice thing is that the more time you make for things, the more time you have.  I still haven't worked out how this actually works with the physics and the motion of the universe (since that's how we measure time these days) but I have found it to be true time and time again.  When you have a productive day and fill in the time gaps with useful things you've been meaning to do, it somehow all gets done.  More things done in less time.  It's probably witchcraft.  But it helps.  It even starts a productive cycle.  You do more, so then you feel better, so then you do more, so then you feel better.  Yeeee.

So if you feel like you don't have time for all the important things and all the things you want to do and all the things you need to do and all the things the other people want you to do....

Just make some time.

temporum

The scholastic year is now drawing to a close, and I'm just now realizing some very valuable things that perhaps have been growing within my mind all throughout the year and are just now blossoming into the maturity that only experience can bring.

The first of these was made known to me around the end of last semester.  Isn't that nice, how your own thoughts can make themselves known to you?  They've been hiding and waiting for a good opportunity to present themselves all this time...because they know that timing is everything.

See, I was reflecting on some of the books that I had "read" throughout middle school and high school and wondered why I now found myself going to the library and checking out classic literature, something that I never imagined myself doing when I was younger and struggling through Animal Farm.  Clearly, there is something wonderful about this literature that I completely ignored or missed when I was younger.

Perhaps some of it had to do with being 'forced' to read the book. When you're in the middle of your cherished teenage years and someone says "read Farenheit 451. It's about questioning authority," there's something inside of you that is like "Oh yeah?  Why should I read your dumb book?  What if I have better things to do? What if I just don't want to? Huh?" And that mindset kindof taints the reading experience.

Perhaps some of it had to be with being in eighth grade and understanding that Animal Farm was an allegory about some sort of tyrannical situation, but being 13 or 14 years old and having no idea who Trotsky is and only being able to compare everything bad to Hitler...you'd be frustrated at not getting the allegory.

Perhaps some of it had to do with not experiencing enough of the world yet to understand what was going on.  Racism was something we'd only read about; grief was something we'd never quite touched; love was something we could only abuse.

With this realization, I decided that I ought to reread some of the books I didn't ingest fully the first time around.  This is, of course, easier said than done because there are all sorts of books out there begging to be read for the first time, and you want to take the time to reread something you didn't like the first time around?  Silly, silly...

So I haven't made it back to any books yet, but I've thought more about timing and life events, and I realized that perhaps if I had learned to play the piano at a different time, I'd have learned to love it and become proficient.  I could learn to play all sorts of beautiful music that I hadn't known existed until recently...

Perhaps if I had fallen in love with soccer earlier, I could have turned that into much more than a recreational passion.

There are all sorts of what-if questions in regard to timing.  But my wise seventh grade teacher told me at the beginning of the year that contrary to popular belief, there is a such thing as a stupid question, and most often those stupid questions start with "what if".

So don't get bogged down in stupid questions.  I've found that things move in and out of my life with immaculate timing to make me the person I am and keep me on track to the person I'm becoming. If something doesn't work out the first time, that doesn't mean it isn't meant to be, it just means it's not the right time.

And just for the record, I'm not the only person to have this sentiment.

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven"
-Ecclesiastes 3:1