Happy Belated New Year! My computer has been down (yet again), this time due to a graphics card failure. Having just got it back up, I found this great article linked by TameGoesWild: Procrastination. It talks about good and bad types of procrastination, so you can avoid feeling guilty on those days when Twitter or Youtube absorb you (so long as you are being productive :P).

The basic gist of the article is that everything is a type of procrastination (we must sacrifice something in order to do something else). What matters is sacrificing important things for less important things – that is bad procrastination. Things like housework and browsing the internet (‘because it’s important to keep up with my Twitter friends and stay active in the blogging community!’) count as less important tasks (than, say, revising for exams or working).*

Yet it’s important to realise that we cannot be active and working on our important tasks at our full potential all the time. We need time to recuperate. During those ‘down’ times, housework and Youtube come in handy. In Japanese, we refer to it as 気分転換 (kibuntenkan – a change of mood). This can be anything from going for a walk, changing the room in which you are studying or going skydiving. It doesn’t matter, so long as the feeling of stagnation subsides.

So, with that in mind, we can all revel in the times of chocolate gorging and watching pointless videos, because they provide much needed refreshment for our minds. That said, posting too many blog posts that aren’t conductive to me getting a good mark on my exam constitute bad procrastination. So just for that, we’ll get some handy revision posts in in the coming month! Expect to be overloaded with philosophy – I apologise in advance!

*The exception might be if you earn a serious living from blogging.

Image from KenLeeWrites