• From Dynomight’s piece on trying to like stuff:

    “At the same time, those invitations seem like a glimpse of a parallel universe. Are there members of my species who sit back and enjoy flights?

    I have no hard data. But it’s a good heuristic that there are people “who actually X” for approximately all values of X. If one in nine people enjoy going to the dentist, surely at least that many enjoy being on planes.”

    I think subliminally we’re aware of the notion that we can exert a significant amount of influence over how we experience situations, even if we can’t exactly control the situation at hand. It’s nice to remind ourselves of this through posts touching on it. We could be the one in nine people.

  • An essay so popular you know it by its URL. From John Perry’s note on structured procrastination:

    Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

    The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don’t). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren’t). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I’m sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn’t much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won’t come along. Then I’ll get to work on it.