Procrastination with Use, or "The Story of Structured Shading"
This text is a translation of an old, but still relevant, article by John Perry on organized shirking — a way to do a lot by not doing something most important.
It is possible that someone will immediately recall other ways to remove this “stress of start”, when instead of starting the same thing, the Big and Important, you take on other, also useful, but not so urgent and important things, or just split up a big task into several small and not scary. Fine! Now in your arsenal for another tool more. Tell us about your impressions in the comments.
* * *
')
I was going to write this article a few months. Why finally going? Maybe there was free time? Not. I also need to look at the students' work and put the grades, fill out order forms for textbooks, respond to the proposal of the State Science Foundation, read drafts of dissertations. And, in order not to do any of the above, I am writing this article.
This is the essence of what I call “organized shirking.” An amazing strategy that I recently discovered. It turns malicious exterminators into effective people who are respected and admired for what they can do, for the benefits they can bring.
Scatters are people who constantly postpone the things that need to be done. Organized shirking is the art of making this vice work for you. His main idea is that a shirking person is not a slacker. Such people rarely literally sit back. As a rule, they are busy with some minor, but useful things - for example, working in the garden, sharpening pencils, drawing diagrams to organize their documents in case they ever get together to do this. Why deviate do it? Because it allows you not to do something else, more important. If sharpening pencils were the only thing that a scavenger needs to do, then no force could have made him do it. Shirking can be motivated to engage in time-consuming, long and important matters only if these matters allow for the postponement of some more important matters.
Organized shirking is a job with a list of tasks facing a person, taking into account this fact. The list of tasks that is in person’s head is sorted by importance. The most important and urgent tasks are on top. But below are worthy of the task below the list. And the implementation of these tasks becomes a way not to do everything above. With such a structure of tasks, a scavenger turns into a useful citizen. He may even acquire, as it happened with me, the reputation of a person who manages to manage to do a lot of things at once.
In my life, the most perfect situation for organized shirking happened when my wife and I worked at the college council and lived next to a Stanford hostel called Soto House. In the evenings, when it was necessary to check student work, prepare for lectures, do some business of the council, I left our house and went to play ping-pong with the guys from the hostel, or went to someone in the room about something to chat , or just sat on the spot and read the newspaper. Over time, I had a reputation as one of the few university professors on campus who really knows students and spends time with them. What irony: ping-pong as a way not to do something more important - and you get the reputation of "your board" guy.
Shirkers often choose the wrong tactics: they try to take less responsibility, believing that the less things they need to do, the more likely they will stop trying to shirk and finish everything as soon as possible. But this contradicts the very nature of the shirker and deprives them of their main source of motivation. A couple of items in the task list will, by definition, be the most important and urgent - and the only way to shirk them will be to do nothing at all. This is the path to becoming a bum, not an effective human being.
Surely you are already asking yourself the question: “But what about the important tasks in the upper points of the list that a person never performs?” I have to admit, this is indeed a potential problem.
The trick is to pick the right points. Ideal tasks for the top points of the list are characterized by two things: first, they supposedly have a clear deadline (in fact, no). Secondly, they seem very important (in fact they are not). Fortunately, life gives us a lot of similar tasks. In universities, the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I think the same is true of many other large organizations. Take, for example, the top item from my current task list. He says that I need to finish an article for a book on the philosophy of language. This article should have been submitted eleven months ago. I did a bunch of different things to put off writing it. A couple of months ago, suffering from feelings of guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor; I apologized in every possible way that I delayed the deadlines and expressed a good intention to sit down at work. The letter, of course, was another way to not write an article. It turned out that I delayed the deadlines no more than the rest. And is this article really important in itself? No more important than any other thing that seems even more important than the article. That's when I finally sit down for her.
Another good example is book order forms. Now it's June. In October, my course on the theory of knowledge begins. Order forms for textbooks are already expired. It is easy to take it for a task with a burning deadline (I explain it especially for non-hogglers: the deadline, as a rule, begins to really burn in two weeks after the stated date). The secretary at the faculty calls me almost daily with reminders, students sometimes ask themselves which books we will study, and the order forms of the books are right in front of me on the desktop, under the sandwich wrapper I ate last Wednesday. This task is almost the main in importance on my list; she does not give me peace and thus motivates me to engage in other useful, but much less important matters. And in the bookstore, they are sewn up with applications that were filed by non-scummers on time. If I fill out the forms and bring them by mid-summer, everything will be fine. I need to order the right popular books from good publishers. I will have some new important business from the present moment to, say, on August 1. And then I will ripen to these forms, to take up their new business instead.
Attentively, the attentive reader has come to the conclusion that organized shirking is a kind of self-deception, and consists in the constant accumulation of the pyramid of tasks. Everything is just like that. It is necessary to recognize cases in which the importance is too high and unrealistic deadlines are appointed, but at the same time continue to treat them as if they are very important and, as they say, “burn”. Problems should not arise, because most otlynivalschikov have an innate skill of self-deception. And what could be more noble than using one vice to neutralize the effects of another?
Original (English): Organized shabby , John Perry, 1995
Translation: © ouch_my_brain, ruguevara , urbansheep , RealMan.
License: CC: BY-NC-SA
It is possible that someone will immediately recall other ways to remove this “stress of start”, when instead of starting the same thing, the Big and Important, you take on other, also useful, but not so urgent and important things, or just split up a big task into several small and not scary. Fine! Now in your arsenal for another tool more. Tell us about your impressions in the comments.
* * *
')
I was going to write this article a few months. Why finally going? Maybe there was free time? Not. I also need to look at the students' work and put the grades, fill out order forms for textbooks, respond to the proposal of the State Science Foundation, read drafts of dissertations. And, in order not to do any of the above, I am writing this article.
This is the essence of what I call “organized shirking.” An amazing strategy that I recently discovered. It turns malicious exterminators into effective people who are respected and admired for what they can do, for the benefits they can bring.
Scatters are people who constantly postpone the things that need to be done. Organized shirking is the art of making this vice work for you. His main idea is that a shirking person is not a slacker. Such people rarely literally sit back. As a rule, they are busy with some minor, but useful things - for example, working in the garden, sharpening pencils, drawing diagrams to organize their documents in case they ever get together to do this. Why deviate do it? Because it allows you not to do something else, more important. If sharpening pencils were the only thing that a scavenger needs to do, then no force could have made him do it. Shirking can be motivated to engage in time-consuming, long and important matters only if these matters allow for the postponement of some more important matters.
Organized shirking is a job with a list of tasks facing a person, taking into account this fact. The list of tasks that is in person’s head is sorted by importance. The most important and urgent tasks are on top. But below are worthy of the task below the list. And the implementation of these tasks becomes a way not to do everything above. With such a structure of tasks, a scavenger turns into a useful citizen. He may even acquire, as it happened with me, the reputation of a person who manages to manage to do a lot of things at once.
In my life, the most perfect situation for organized shirking happened when my wife and I worked at the college council and lived next to a Stanford hostel called Soto House. In the evenings, when it was necessary to check student work, prepare for lectures, do some business of the council, I left our house and went to play ping-pong with the guys from the hostel, or went to someone in the room about something to chat , or just sat on the spot and read the newspaper. Over time, I had a reputation as one of the few university professors on campus who really knows students and spends time with them. What irony: ping-pong as a way not to do something more important - and you get the reputation of "your board" guy.
Shirkers often choose the wrong tactics: they try to take less responsibility, believing that the less things they need to do, the more likely they will stop trying to shirk and finish everything as soon as possible. But this contradicts the very nature of the shirker and deprives them of their main source of motivation. A couple of items in the task list will, by definition, be the most important and urgent - and the only way to shirk them will be to do nothing at all. This is the path to becoming a bum, not an effective human being.
Surely you are already asking yourself the question: “But what about the important tasks in the upper points of the list that a person never performs?” I have to admit, this is indeed a potential problem.
The trick is to pick the right points. Ideal tasks for the top points of the list are characterized by two things: first, they supposedly have a clear deadline (in fact, no). Secondly, they seem very important (in fact they are not). Fortunately, life gives us a lot of similar tasks. In universities, the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I think the same is true of many other large organizations. Take, for example, the top item from my current task list. He says that I need to finish an article for a book on the philosophy of language. This article should have been submitted eleven months ago. I did a bunch of different things to put off writing it. A couple of months ago, suffering from feelings of guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor; I apologized in every possible way that I delayed the deadlines and expressed a good intention to sit down at work. The letter, of course, was another way to not write an article. It turned out that I delayed the deadlines no more than the rest. And is this article really important in itself? No more important than any other thing that seems even more important than the article. That's when I finally sit down for her.
Another good example is book order forms. Now it's June. In October, my course on the theory of knowledge begins. Order forms for textbooks are already expired. It is easy to take it for a task with a burning deadline (I explain it especially for non-hogglers: the deadline, as a rule, begins to really burn in two weeks after the stated date). The secretary at the faculty calls me almost daily with reminders, students sometimes ask themselves which books we will study, and the order forms of the books are right in front of me on the desktop, under the sandwich wrapper I ate last Wednesday. This task is almost the main in importance on my list; she does not give me peace and thus motivates me to engage in other useful, but much less important matters. And in the bookstore, they are sewn up with applications that were filed by non-scummers on time. If I fill out the forms and bring them by mid-summer, everything will be fine. I need to order the right popular books from good publishers. I will have some new important business from the present moment to, say, on August 1. And then I will ripen to these forms, to take up their new business instead.
Attentively, the attentive reader has come to the conclusion that organized shirking is a kind of self-deception, and consists in the constant accumulation of the pyramid of tasks. Everything is just like that. It is necessary to recognize cases in which the importance is too high and unrealistic deadlines are appointed, but at the same time continue to treat them as if they are very important and, as they say, “burn”. Problems should not arise, because most otlynivalschikov have an innate skill of self-deception. And what could be more noble than using one vice to neutralize the effects of another?
Original (English): Organized shabby , John Perry, 1995
Translation: © ouch_my_brain, ruguevara , urbansheep , RealMan.
License: CC: BY-NC-SA
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/30037/
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