Procrastination

Oh the irony, writing a blog post about procrastination, mostly to avoid the pile of 20 papers I don’t really feel like reading. I’m sure Alanis would have added it to her lyrics, if blogs were a thing in 1995.

Some time ago I went to a seminar called “The Seven Secrets of Highly Successful PhD students”. Usually the courses provided by the university aren’t that great. But this sounded like it could be interesting and it was an excuse to do something else for a few hours. Also, the speaker was from a university in Australia, and I don’t mind listening to Australian accents at all.

Turns out Hugh Kearns is a professor in Australia, but he’s actually Irish. Only a mild disappointment there. Fortunately, the lecture turned out to be extremely interesting.

One of these secrets to success, number four to be exact is: “Say no to distractions.” We all know we should away from social media. But there are a whole list of hidden distractions, that don’t seem too harmful, that we use as an excuse not to work. Like going to a course about how to avoid procrastination. Or cleaning your room because “you can’t get anything done while it’s messy. Checking emails and reorganising outlook files. A surprising form of procrastination is to search and organise references. Just to avoid having to actually start writing.

I’m not up to writing yet, but now I am in a position where I need to do some extensive literature research.

So I’ve decided to preform random Fourier transforms on my data.

Then I worked on a presentation that to be honest is already finished and doesn’t need any more work.

And then I decided to write a blog post about how not getting any work done.

And I’ll have lunch in about half an hour so no use starting anything now.

Ugh, maybe I can read one paper by then…

You can find out more about Hugh Kearns and his secrets to succes on Thinkwell.