procrastination and catharsis
Sometime last week, I got linked to this essay on procrastination, which I found interesting. (My Netflix queue is not quite like the one described in the opening of the essay, but the difference is, I think, one of degree rather than kind.) The analysis seems to me pretty spot-on, especially this line:
You run out of time to get things done because you think in the future, that mysterious fantastical realm of possibilities, you'll have more free time than you do now.
Yeah, that.
And the analysis of the value of deadlines also made sense to me; certainly I'm much better about, say, grading student papers in a timely fashion when I plan to give those papers back at individual conferences, and the conferences are spread out over several days, giving me, in effect, several deadlines: even if I leave each group of papers to the last minute, I can't leave them ALL to the last minute.
That essay led me to the one on catharsis, which I found interesting in its own right and also applicable to the perennial "someone is WRONG on the internet" (or elsewhere) situation. I am pretty easy-going in a lot of ways, but I am also decidedly short-tempered, and I am a big believer in venting -- or at least I would say that I am, if asked -- but while reading the essay, two things occurred to me. First: the point of venting for me is not really that I am diffusing my anger or irritation but that I am using shared indignation to bond with the person to whom I'm venting (which I would argue is actually valuable in a way that the essay doesn't acknowledge, but is not the same as letting go of the anger). Second: I have been, in general, happier and less emotionally volatile since I bought a house and started a garden, and while there are many reasons for this (such as having a stable job, which reduced my ambient stress like whoa), I think that one reason is that I have many more non-venting outlets for anger: I plug into the iPod and go outside and dig or weed or pick or plant, or go down to the basement and build shelves, or deal with the backlog of laundry, or whatever. I am more able -- more physically able, not just emotionally able -- to walk away from anger rather than wallow in it. I hadn't thought about it in quite those terms before, but -- yeah. Interesting.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
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You run out of time to get things done because you think in the future, that mysterious fantastical realm of possibilities, you'll have more free time than you do now.
Yeah, that.
And the analysis of the value of deadlines also made sense to me; certainly I'm much better about, say, grading student papers in a timely fashion when I plan to give those papers back at individual conferences, and the conferences are spread out over several days, giving me, in effect, several deadlines: even if I leave each group of papers to the last minute, I can't leave them ALL to the last minute.
That essay led me to the one on catharsis, which I found interesting in its own right and also applicable to the perennial "someone is WRONG on the internet" (or elsewhere) situation. I am pretty easy-going in a lot of ways, but I am also decidedly short-tempered, and I am a big believer in venting -- or at least I would say that I am, if asked -- but while reading the essay, two things occurred to me. First: the point of venting for me is not really that I am diffusing my anger or irritation but that I am using shared indignation to bond with the person to whom I'm venting (which I would argue is actually valuable in a way that the essay doesn't acknowledge, but is not the same as letting go of the anger). Second: I have been, in general, happier and less emotionally volatile since I bought a house and started a garden, and while there are many reasons for this (such as having a stable job, which reduced my ambient stress like whoa), I think that one reason is that I have many more non-venting outlets for anger: I plug into the iPod and go outside and dig or weed or pick or plant, or go down to the basement and build shelves, or deal with the backlog of laundry, or whatever. I am more able -- more physically able, not just emotionally able -- to walk away from anger rather than wallow in it. I hadn't thought about it in quite those terms before, but -- yeah. Interesting.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth