Thursday, June 21, 2007

Yay! I'm a structured procrastinator

The fact that I just ran across John Perry's essay on Structured Procrastination (via pmarca), 12 years after it was first posted, proves there are still big opportunities ahead in search, collaborative filtering, and recommendation systems.

John's essay explains my daily existence, and how to turn a "bad habit" into an effective strategy:
"This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an
amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into
effective human beings...  The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing
absolutely nothing...the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and
important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing
something more important.  Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact."
It's short and concise -- definitely worth a read if you're not 100% satisfied with your ability to get things done.

2 comments:

Mark Wubben said...

It took you twelve years to read that? Talk about procrastinating...
Hey I'm going to be in town next month, already contacted SJ to have lunch at the plex, I'll see you then?

Ryan said...

Hi Scott -
Was looking for a way to contact you, and this ended up seeming the most straightforward ;) I think you've done some great work at Jotspot, and have some interesting writings here on your blog. I'm always looking for sharp people to be in touch with...I've got a couple projects rattling around in my head that I wanted to flesh out and wondered if you might be up for a chat/coffee sometime? If so let me know...you can see more of my background on LinkedIn...
Ryan Kiskis (wyndairn@gmail.com)