Monday (MLK Day) marks a small deadline for me and I'm slaving away to meet it--or pretending to. I am staggered by my own reluctance to read when I'm under pressure. I will sit down to "work" and decide that the most important thing I need to do for the day is to read, say, a certain essay.
Then I will proceed to google the author, free write on my current procrastination, and then do all the other unrelated procrastinatory things (checking blogs, making notes for future blog entries in the "Fernham" file on my computer, reading catalogs, watching cooking shows). All the normal kinds of procrastination seem, well, normal to me.
What astounds me is my ability to sit, with text in hand, and still not read it but instead to read around it, consider it, read everything in the world ancillary to it in my whole apartment and available on the web before I actually read the essay in question.
Sigh.
I did actually get down to some reading today but, oy!, it was no thanks to me that I got myself working.
I hope to be more present, less scattered, once Monday's past....
Besides, the new quarter at the LBC is kicking into gear next week and it's going to be great!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
6 comments:
So interesting to hear about people's procrastination "techniques". In my case, procrastination often takes the *form* of academic reading.
At any rate, good luck in meeting your deadline!
This post hit close to home. I, too, have some work that needs to be sent off by the 15th and I am dreading it.
I thought I was the ONLY one who did things like that. I liked the part of actually holding the text in hand and not reading.
Have a great weekend, despite the work.
Peace,
Geoffrey
Hi Anne, I just took two essays, a journal and a book away for a few days en famille. I read about 150 pp, no essays, one or two things out of the journal, and went down the street and promptly bought a Summer Reading edition of one of the weekly business mags to read my blogging friends' stories. And that's without the Internet.
: )
You all make me so happy--this is very cheering!
I'm just as bad. Even if it's a book I want to read and then I have to read it for whatever reason, I'll put it off. I'll start it, put it down to read something else, anything.
Just to say (don't get me started on topic of procrastination, though mine afflicts me far more with writing than with reading, and of course with paper-grading above all) how nice it was to meet you the other day! Hope we can talk again soon...
Post a Comment