Procrastinators Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from chronic procrastination.

"Parking lots" and reserved time

Just a quick note...

I saw a discussion here (the one about Making the Right Choice) that looked interesting but I'm deferring reading it in the name of staying on task. I book marked it in my browser so I can quickly find it. 

This brings me to a question: 

Who among us has had good luck in creating and using a "parking lot" for useful, enjoyable, but otherwise distracting activities, so that you can healthfully put off something that might otherwise distract you from your MIT's at hand? How do you do it and how does it work for you?

 

 

 

 

Not bulletin board, but a cork strip (msg)

Hi GS!

The last couple of days I've been thinking about your question.

In the next month or two I will be in my new condo. I have a thought of somewhere putting up 1 or 2 cork strips; not a whole bulletin board, but some cork strips where I could sequentially put some reminders of what I want to do each day/evening, and/or like you say, something I can switch to when I get off track. I have a lot to do before I can put up the cork strips, but I am hoping that is an idea I can try.

Let us know if you think of any other ideas! :)

Recycler

Thank you, gals & guys, for being here! :)

Cool! I thought of this recently too!

Hey George. One night when I was procrastinating I found myself reading quite a number of interesting, inspirational, or mind-challenging articles that I would never have come across under my normal activities. It's weirdly one of the 'benefits' of procrastinating - discovering new things through randomly browsing the web.

Anyway, the quick answer to your question is yes. I've set up a bookmark folder in my browser (Safari) called "spare time read" (it should probably be better named but I'm trying not to be too perfectionistic). In it I've stored random articles to escape to when I don't feel like doing 'work'.

Here are some examples that are currently in that folder: biographies of my heroes or interesting people, ideas of time management systems, webpages about Rhetoric and winning arguments, links to pages about some of my recently watched films.... etc

I haven't escaped to it yet, which is a good thing, but on the other hand I can't tell you whether it's been beneficial to me yet.

So if you use it before me, post an update and lemme know how it affected you?

Surfing the web as procrastination

Yes,

that's what I do too.

I've realised that's one of my major 'payoffs' for procrastinating, the chance that I'll happen across something really interesting. But of course, a lot of the time, I haven't found anything that challenged me that much, so I was just wasting time.

I've realised that's a major reason for my boredom based procrastination, I'll be doing a boring task and I get so desperate for intellectual stimulation, that I can't stop myself from surfing online, trying to find something 'interesting'.

Unfortunately, I'm more likely to find 'junk food' information rather than something really satisfying.

Huh. I guess that is like binge eating or something. I wonder if I found and challenged myself with something a few times a day I'd be more satisfied?

Like, an 'article of the day' site, or sudoku - I know I feel more 'satisfied' by playing my guitar for a little while, learning something new, or doing a sketch when I was learning to draw.

Challenge yourself every day

Hmm.. That's an interesting idea. It's never occurred to me that maybe my procrastination is because I'm not being challenged enough. I'm not sure that it is the reason to be honest.

But the idea of setting yourself challenges throughout the day does seem like a novel idea. I guess the closest equivalent to what I've experienced so far is reading inspiring articles on some days. These sort of articles challenge my mind and they do usually have an affect on me for the rest of the day.

I'm gonna try to remember that and try to implement it. Thanks.

Marking websites to read later etc

This isn't for everything, but for websites, I have organised friends who use - http://www.instapaper.com/ to mark things they want to look at later, from different computers (google bookmarks can do that to), and it seems to work well for them.

One time management book suggested just writing down what it was you wanted to do whenever you *wanted* to get distracted - the site you wanted to visit, the thought you had, so you could get back to work. I've occasionally done it, just to resist the urge to get distracted, but it had the bonus of writing down the ideas which maybe I *didn't* want to forget, along with the distractions.