Saturday, November 4, 2006

The shillyshally business

Have you ever encountered procrastination?
And if you did, how did you deal with it?

This I asked my good friend AN, who is a number of years younger to me and taking her A level exams currently. But she's brainy and efficient, or at least I think she is.

Her advice:
Tell yourself you're going to continue procrastinating for another 5 minutes [or 10]; set the time and countdown to it. And then focus on your work, all the while reminding yourself of what life will be like after you're done with your work.

I believed it to be good advice, so I thought of the things I had to do: [1]collect material I want to present for my political science presentation on "post-feminism"; [2]create the slides for my part of another presentation I have to do on the Yellow Ribbon Project for my New Media class; [3]edit some images for my group-members in the New Media class who don't know how to use Photoshop; [4]print-out a 100 survey forms to distribute tomorrow during our @LC gathering; [5]clean my room, which means not just dusting and sweeping, but also organising all my stuff so that I can find anything I want during my exam-prep; [6]make a sleep diary, food diary and an activity log for today and the past two days; [7]and finally, connect my desktop computer and see if it works.

And then my mind began to wonder about all the OTHER things I had to do; for instance, finish five, big, fat books for my finals. Or the designing and printing of posters for the NUS Student Recruitment Drive for the AIESEC Outgoing Exchange thing. And finding a job for the December vacation - who's gonna do that!

What if the work is never-ending?

To this, AN said, "No work is never-ending; and if it is, you're at the wrong place."

Spellbound for a few minutes, I realised this is what university life is all about: never-ending work. So I did what I do best: I procrastinated some more until I ran out of excuses to avoid work and came to making this entry on my blog, which serves me yet another excuse. I guess I'll just wander in this virtual world to find someone else to speak to, until I'm fairly sleepy and I go to sleep.

"Good luck with life!" AN wished me as she signed off.

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