Degrees of procrastination

The other day, I was supposed to start grading papers but ended up spending the whole evening watching YouTube videos from some TV show.

Procrastination is familiar to everyone, so I'm not going to talk much about what it is and to what degree that particular phenomenon is annoying me personally. I am more interested in combatting it.

That is, if it is possible to combat it. Is it possible to avoid procrastinating when you have a dreary task you have to do before you can do something you really want?

If it is possible, I think doing so is going to require a mix of several techniques. One technique that I think could be handy, but haven't really tried yet, is procrastinating
to a lesser degree.

For instance - as mentioned above, I was supposed to be grading papers but got stuck watching all the videos I could find from the particular TV show I found interesting that afternoon. Whether I found the TV show interesting in itself or whether it got more interesting because of the drearyness of the task that I was supposed to do, I don't know.

Big on inventing - not so big on procrastinating.

But what I realized was that there were so many things I could rather have been doing in that time - things that were less dreary than what I was really supposed to be doing, while still way more productive than watching YouTube videos. For instance, I could have done some Scheme programming to learn that better, or I could have written blog posts, or working on that music playlist manager I have been thinking about, etc. That would have been a good compromise between my desire to procrastinate the exam grading and my need/desire to develop as a human being.

So why didn't I? Because of the nature of procrastinating. I didn't set out with the goal of watching YouTube all afternoon. In the beginning, I just felt like watching a couple of videos. After watching a couple of videos, I just wanted to finish watching the videos from that particular show. Of course I didn't research whether that was actually feasible to do within a reasonable amount of time, which it of course wasn't. I ended up watching videos until bedtime.

The point of the above: I don't know until after it has happened that I have been procrastinating. So it's all well and good in retrospect to say that I could have done something else that would have been more productive, but I was already going to do something else - I was going to do the actual task at hand. It just... didn't happen.

Which leads to the conclusion that procrastination can't be fought. At least with this technique. At least with this technique alone. But maybe, by combining this 'lesser evils' concept with other methods, it actually can be possible to do something about it? This is something I will try to explore, and I also think this blog will make it easier to do so.

In retrospect, this post... I don't know. It's bad. Everything above has been sa id already, my someone, somewhere. Probably by a lot of people, a lot of places. But that's to be expected with this sort of blog, I guess. I just hope my posts improve.