Procrastination Chronicles # 10: Reading Walden

On the path to greatness, there will be 100 overcomings.

I will chronicle my attempts to overcome procrastination.  My technique is to start small, really small.

My favorite post in the series is #3 Dealing with a Bunch of Crap.

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I think I now have a process for reading books I have been putting off: skip ahead and read various parts until something captures my attention.

This gets over one of the great principles of procrastination: the inertia of it; an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion.  When I start at a book a few times, each time I don't get past the current page sets up more resistance to ever getting off that page.  It  emphatically does not help that I have good reasons to read the book.  Thoreau is to American Nature Writing as Socrates is to Western Philosophy; you may disagree, but you must answer to him.  It is embarrassing that I have not read Walden.  Embarrassing!  If that is not enough, one of the only people who actually reads this blog, the best man at my wedding, is a big fan of the book, so I should read it.  But still, each time you abandon a step of a project, even if it is the first step -- read page 1 -- you will encounter more psychic resistance the next time you try again.

I even know what my problem with the first page of Walden has always been: it just comes off sanctimonious.  When reading it, I kept having the intrusion of all the criticisms of Thoreau I have heard from people who may or may not have read him, but need to let people know he didn't rough it as much as he claimed.

So I skipped that page and ran into a charming mediation on heat, life and how much shelter and clothes we really need.  I fell in love with this passage and have no doubt I'll be able to enjoy Walden and make Thoreau a friend of mine.

I may be able to formulate this into an anti-procrastination principal for reading a classic: try skipping ahead.  A book is usually deemed a classic for a reason, so give it more than one chance to show you its value.

Also, remember if you are reading for yourself (and there is really no other good reason for someone past school to be reading) then feel free to skim portions, or skip portions, of books, yes, even classics.  So once you realize a book is worth your time, and you find something you like -- which in my case is the philosophical "digressions" -- skip things you are not interested in -- which in my case is most physical descriptions; I can see things in the real world, after all.

Update:

Thoreau in less than a year has grown to be one of my favorite authors.  I have plans to read everything he wrote, including looking into purchasing a copy of his journals.

This just goes to show that you, fair reader, you may very well be procrastinating on something that might turn out profoundly changing your life.  I clearly was.

Better Backgammon

To any novice level player who wants to improve their game, I recommend  the positions from the book Better Backgammon by Tim Holland.  I finished them in a binge one night.  Then I reviewed the night after, and then took a week off backgammon.  This gave me spaced repetition on the concepts, and the week break allowed me to work on other things at a time that backgammon fever had wrecked my capacity to get things done.

I looked at them a week later, and here I am months later, giving the positions another look.  They really helped me to have GNU backgammon criticize my play less, or other words, you know, to play better backgammon.

Next goal (probably) 100 push-ups in a set

These last 3 weeks all have had a tournament, so I haven't working out.  So now it's time to get back to that, with push ups.  Back to getting a lot of practice through greasing the groove.

I was able to get past the 200 squats goal by learning to control my breathing better. I can't do the same breathing with a push up.  It would seem I just need to actually get stronger.

It seems like this goal and paying off my house, and perhaps an coaching a state champion are in a race to be the next goal I can achieve.

A Potentially Low-Hanging Fruit: a Mobile App

It has recently occurred to me that I have a relatively easy goal on my bucket list  that I have been overlooking: make a mobile app.

The goal was born out of commercials for The Internship which misleadingly cut parts of the movie to make it seem like the two bro/buds had a challenge to make an app by themselves.  That made me think that, yeah, that seemed possible, but, yeah, it sure would seem impressive to an outsider if someone did that.

After putting it on my list, however, I have suffered from the rigid thinking of my goal of getting 10,000 people to use my software, so I have been thinking I have to make something good/useful that could scale up, which if anything has frozen me up.

I could just find a quicker path to making some kind of prototype app!  Do this, and I can cross off another goal on what was once a daunting list, but I see as now simply moving one step at a time and trying to use some clever thought from time to time.

Ideas for a prototype mobile app: 1.) a program that will play closed Chinese-Poker with the user 1B.) a program that will play closed Chinese-Poker for low hands against you 2.) a program for using a tiny-core of Esperanto and then the ability to use a different online dictionaries to allow people to do a quick and dirty method of communicating.

I see now that these apps could be made fairly quickly, once I commit to the process.