Procrastination: I’m supposed to be working, but instead, I’m wasting more of my potential.

Alas, it is a beautiful day here in Berkeley, California.

The sun is shining. I can hear the bells of the ice cream truck outside my window. The kids that live next door are enjoying their plastic pool. It’s 75° and a cool breeze is blowing.

I am inside.

Why?

Because I’m supposed to be writing my first field statement – about the anthropology of science. I know, that sounds really cool, right? Well, maybe not exactly.

Instead of actually writing, I’m still “researching”, which involves a lot of Google searches. And it also involves checking my email 20 times even though no one is writing to me because it’s a gorgeous day and other people have things called “lives”. Apparently, they exist somewhere out there, outside the walls of academe.

Also, it involves opening the refrigerator just to “look”. And think about eating an orange. And getting some more water, or coffee, or diet coke. And sitting back down in front of the computer with a firm resolution to: “Just write something already!”

In the back of my head, I keep telling myself that writing this is no big deal. If it sucks, I rewrite it. Emphasis on “re”, after having actually written something. Oh, I have 38 pages of notes and a complete bibliography. But no text. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Zero.

I try to trick myself into writing by thinking that at least I’m not in Haiti lining up for food. That this is ridiculous compared to most people’s troubles. I’m not a hemophiliac, right? Things aren’t so bad. So far, no cancer.

Then why am I making myself miserable?

Do I like being miserable?

I must. Because I LOVE procrastinating.

I also love thinking about all my ‘wasted potential’ while I’m doing it.

‘Potential’ sucks.

It’s overrated.

I think I’m going to dedicate a couple of postings, or maybe another whole page on “Wasted Potential”. Maybe I’ll share stories of famously wasted potentials. Or how to get over the envy that comes along with it, while you are watching other people, not laden with ‘potential’, actually out there doing things and – gasp! – succeeding. While you, me, us, whoever, are all frozen by our collective incapacity to actualize any of our so-called ‘potential’.

Oh, if only I could procrastinate the self-doubt, self-criticism, uncertainty and fear. Or FUSS, for a nice acronym.

If only I could stop all the FUSS, and get down to work.

Paris Hilton is boring, and I’m not going to take it anymore. . . .

I used to frequent gossip sites. You know, those nasty, vituperative sites that catalogue absolutely everything that a celebrity, or quasi-celebrity, does, then mocks it? (For those of you who do not frequent, here is a sample.)

Now, I’m no stranger to judgment. It’s my favorite game. Especially when it comes to women.

Except that recently, I’ve realized that being bitter or happy about other people’s successes or failures is probably the stupidest waste of time ever. Basically, it means that I procrastinate – one might say it is a symbol of my larger procrastination problem – and I don’t actually have many successes or failures of my own. Paris Hilton, Miley Cyrus, and Angelina Jolie are ruining my life.

Or, rather, my obsession with checking out DAILY what is going on with THEIR lives is ruining MY life.

So, no more.

I am throwing out my trashy magazines (you know who you are), and I am not going to be clicking on any gossip sites from now on. Because what do I really care if Angelina is pregnant or no? Is my own life so boring that these people seem more interesting?

Hell, I have friends more messed up and interesting than these people. Maybe we should start blogging about real people, since their lives are completely more complicated, intense and fascinating than “fake” lives being lived out in NYC or LA.

Plus, it might make us all feel better about ourselves. We’ve lost all touch with what ‘reality’ is, with all of these psuedo ‘reality’ shows. I, for one, live in reality and there are no TV camera crews here.

Now, I’m not going to stop watching Rock of Love II, because that’s just good TV. But everything else? Going.

I’ll have to find another way to procrastinate not living my own life or doing my own work. And I’ll have to stop fantasizing that if I were (pick one or any that apply for yourself), rich, skinny, beautiful, had a hot boyfriend, traveled to Bali or Hawaii whenever I wanted – that i would be happier.

Um, have you seen how “happy” these people are?

Procrastination, revisited: I am addicted to gaming

I guess you could say that I’ve always been a gamer chick. Since the old days of Atari, Ms. Pac Man and Donkey Kong. When Tetris came out, I played it nonstop. Ditto for the original PS system.

My version of crack are RPGs (role-playing games for those who are not versed in gamer lingo), or first-person shooters. I think that I’ve played every version of Resident Evil since it came out ages ago, even though I am TERRIFIED of zombies. (Seriously, I used to have dreams at least twice a week that I was being attacked by zombies and I had to punch out their eyes with my bare thumbs. Gross.)

Right now, I’m on break from class. What am I doing with my time? Reading? Getting ahead on reading for class? Starting to devise my strategy for my first field statement? Organizing the conference panel session I’ll be co-hosting in July in China? Cleaning my house?

No. Nope. Nuh-uh. Not exactly. Um, no.

I’ve been vigorously trying to beat the hidden dungeon in Dark Cloud 2 (an old classic), which is currently kicking my character’s butt all over the screen. I can spend three or four hours on this damn game at a time – upgrading weapons to see what they can transform into, getting extra goodies from treasure chests, figuring out the best way to kill moles. Lately, I’ve even been dreaming about it.

As a gamer, I’m always attuned to those ’scientific’ reports that tell you one of two things: gaming is good for you, gaming is bad for you.

Here’s an excerpt from the latter from CBS news:

Teens may think they’re just taking little breaks, but David Meyer, a psychologist who directs the Brain, Cognition, and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan, says they have no idea how much time they’re really losing.

“I think there’s a lot of mythology out there about how great multitasking is and that it’s the sexy thing,” Meyer says. He compares the image of the teen who can simultaneously IM with five friends while doing his homework with the Marlboro Man of the mid 20th century. “It’s almost like smoking was in the ’50s and ’60s,” he says. “It’s a bunch of hype.”

That’s because multitaskers don’t just lose the minutes they spend on sites such as Facebook; they also lose time getting reoriented with each interruption, says Meyer, whose lab has conducted experiments on multitasking for more than a decade. That means the homework itself can take between 25 and 400 percent longer depending on the complexity and similarity of the tasks.

Similarity? Yes. It turns out the worst kind of multitasking is between two related tasks, because they use the same parts of the brain. It’s better, Meyer says, to switch from math to piano than, say, history to English.

That’s why it’s possible to fold laundry while listening to the stock report on the radio, he says. “They’re relying on different kinds of information processing,” he says, noting that the folding is a more automated task.

So how about talking on a cell phone and driving? While these may seem like different tasks, they both use the “talking” areas of the brain, Meyer says. Say you’re driving in heavy traffic, he says. “You’re reading signs and thinking what to do next. All this is talking to yourself.”

Grafman, from the NIH, says his problem with multitasking goes beyond concerns about safety or inefficiency.

“If you’re constantly shifting around between tasks, then it’s likely you can actually get pretty good at learning visual motor requirements for that shifting,” he says. “But what does that cost you in terms of depth of knowledge?”

“These are frivolous, leisure time activities” he says, adding that he’d “love to compete against those kids for jobs or anything else they’re not going to have the knowledge.”

This is the alternate view, from an article in Discovery magazine:

Gee’s epiphany led him to the forefront of a wave of research into how video games affect cognition. Bolstered by the results of recent laboratory experiments, Gee and other researchers have dared to suggest that gaming might be mentally enriching. These scholars are the first to admit that games can be addictive, and indeed part of their research explores how games connect to the reward circuits of the human brain. But they are now beginning to recognize the cognitive benefits of playing video games: pattern recognition, system thinking, even patience. Lurking in this research is the idea that gaming can exercise the mind the way physical activity exercises the body: It may be addictive because it’s challenging.

All of this, of course, flies in the face of the classic stereotype of gamers as attention deficit–crazed stimulus junkies, easily distracted by flashy graphics and on-screen carnage. Instead, successful gamers must focus, have patience, develop a willingness to delay gratification, and prioritize scarce resources. In other words, they think.

One of the most popular video games ever created is called Tetris. It involves falling tile-like tetrominoes that a player must quickly maneuver so they fit into space at the bottom of the screen. In the early 1990s, Richard Haier, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Irvine, tracked cerebral glucose metabolic rates in the brains of Tetris players using PET scanners. The glucose rates show how much energy the brain is consuming, and thus serve as a rough estimate of how much work the brain is doing. Haier determined the glucose levels of novice Tetris players as their brains labored to usher the falling blocks into correct locations. Then he took levels again after a month of regular play. Even though the test subjects had improved their game performance by a factor of seven, Haier found that their glucose levels had decreased. It appeared that the escalating difficulty of the game trained the test subjects to mentally manipulate the Tetris blocks with such skill that they barely broke a cognitive sweat completing levels that would have utterly confounded them a month earlier.

Nearly a decade after Haier’s study, Gee hit upon an explanation. He found that even escapist fantasy games are embedded with one of the core principles of learning—students prosper when the subject matter challenges them right at the edge of their abilities. Make the lessons too difficult and the students get frustrated. Make them too easy and they get bored. Cognitive psychologists call this the “regime of competence” principle. Gee’s insight was to recognize that the principle is central to video games: As players progress, puzzles become more complex, enemies swifter and more numerous, underlying patterns more subtle. Most games don’t allow progress until you’ve reached a certain level of expertise.

This is exactly the model of how Tetris works: When you first launch the game, the blocks fall at a leisurely pace, giving you plenty of time to rearrange them as they descend so they’ll fit the spaces where they fall and gradually build up a wall that fills the screen. As you get better at manipulating the blocks, the game starts dropping them at increasing speeds.

To understand why games might be good for the mind, begin by shedding the cliché that they are about improving hand-eye coordination and firing virtual weapons. The majority of video games on the best-seller list contain no more bloodshed than a game of Risk. The most popular games are not simply difficult in the sense of challenging manual dexterity; they challenge mental dexterity as well. The best-selling game of all time, The Sims, involves almost no hand-eye coordination or quick reflexes. One manages a household of characters, each endowed with distinct drives and personality traits, each cycling through an endless series of short-term needs (companionship, say, or food), each enmeshed in a network of relationships with other characters. Playing the game is a nonstop balancing act: sending one character off to work, cleaning the kitchen with another, searching through the classifieds for work with another. Even a violent game like Grand Theft Auto involves networks of characters that the player must navigate and master, picking up clues and detecting patterns. The text walk-through for Grand Theft Auto III—a document that describes all the variables involved in playing the game through to the finish—is 53,000 words long, the length of a short novel. But despite the complexity of these environments, most gamers eschew reading manuals or walk-throughs altogether, preferring to feel their way through the game space.

Gee contends that the way gamers explore virtual worlds mirrors the way the brain processes multiple, but interconnected, streams of information in the real world. “Basically, how we think is through running perceptual simulations in our heads that prepare us for the actions we’re going to take,” he says. “By modeling those simulations, video games externs balize how the mind works.”

What to make of all this? The truth about gaming and the brain is probably somewhere in the middle. I’m not exactly claiming that gaming makes me smarter, but I do feel like my recall is better and I’m more alert after I’ve played. As long as I don’t get sucked into a 5-hour marathon session. Which I sometimes do.

This is my favorite brand of procrastination, actually. Why? Because it sometimes feels like I’m accomplishing something, and assuages my guilt that I’m not accomplishing enough in real life. A mind trick? Sure. But, mostly, I’m OK with that.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my game.

Procrastination facts

Clearly, I am procrastinating. But, ever the perfectionist, I wanted to make certain I was doing it right. So, ergo the following, taken from an institutional (oops, I meant to say educational institution’s) web page. For your own procrastinating pleasure. And, please, let me know if any of the following seem all-too familiar.

Procrastination and Its Causes

In order to understand and solve your procrastination problems, you must carefully analyze those situations where your work is not being completed. First, determine whether the cause is poor time management; if so, you will need to learn and develop time management skills. If, however, you know how to manage your time but don’t make use of those skills, you may have a more serious problem. Many individuals cite the following reasons for avoiding work:

• LACK OF RELEVANCE. If something is neither relevant nor meaningful to you personally, it may be difficult to get motivated even to begin.
• ACCEPTANCE OF ANOTHER’S GOALS. If a project has been imposed or assigned to you and it is not consistent with your own interests, you may be reluctant to spend the necessary time to see it to conclusion.
• PERFECTIONISM. Having unreachable standards will discourage you from pursuing a task. Remember, perfection is unattainable.
• EVALUATION ANXIETY. Since others’ responses to your work are not under your direct control, overvaluing these responses can create the kind of anxiety that will interfere with work getting accomplished.
• AMBIGUITY. If you are uncertain of what is expected of you, it may be difficult to get started.
• FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN. If you are venturing into a new realm or field, you don’t have any way of knowing how well you’ll do. Such an uncertain outcome may inhibit your desire to begin.
• INABILITY TO HANDLE THE TASK. If through lack of training, skill, or ability you feel that you lack the personal resources to do the job, you may avoid it completely.

Procrastination Takes Many Forms

Once you have surmounted the emotional block by acknowledging your procrastination (guilt, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy), and after you have analyzed the underlying causes, you need to clearly specify how you procrastinate. Consider the following examples.

1. Do you act as though if you ignore a task, it will go away? The mid-term exam in your chemistry class is not likely to vaporize, no matter how much you ignore it.
2. Do you underestimate the work involved in the task, or overestimate your abilities and resources in relationship to the task? Do you tell yourself that you grasp concepts so easily that you need only spend one hour on the physics problems which would normally take you six?
3. Do you deceive yourself into believing that a mediocre performance or lesser standards are acceptable? For example, if you deceive yourself that a 2.3 GPA will still get you into the medical school of your choice, you may be avoiding the decision to work harder to improve your grade point average and thus may have to alter your career plans. This form of avoidance can prevent your from consciously making choices about important goals in your life.
4. Do you deceive yourself by substituting one worthy activity for another? Suppose you clean the apartment instead of writing your term paper. Valuing a clean apartment is fine but if that value only becomes important when there is a paper due, you are procrastinating.
5. Do you believe that repeated &quotminor” delays are harmless? An example is putting off writing your paper so you can watch five minutes of your favorite television program. If you don’t return to writing the paper after five minutes have elapsed, you may stay tuned to the television for the entire evening, with no work being done on the paper.
6. Do you dramatize a commitment to a task rather than actually doing it? An example is taking your books on vacation but never opening them, or perhaps even declining invitations for pleasurable events, but still not pursuing the work at hand nor getting needed relaxation. This way you stay in a constant state of unproductive readiness to work–without ever working.
7. Do you persevere on only one portion of the task? An example is writing and rewriting the introductory paragraph of the paper but not dealing with the body and the conclusion. The introductory paragraph is important, but not at the expense of the entire project.
8. Do you become paralyzed in deciding between alternative choices? An example involves spending so much time deciding between two term paper topics that you don’t have sufficient time to write the paper.