Mar 4, 2023·edited Mar 4, 2023Liked by Michael Marshall Smith
By having two or three projects on the go, I inevitably hit a procrastination point on one of them, so I use the time I "shouldn't" be working on one of those other things to do it as a displacement activity. Until I hit a procrastination point on *it* too. And round it goes, until enough time pressure comes up on the first project that I have to go back and do the bit I was originally procrastinating on (usually it is just boring and takes five annoying painful minutes).
I think women have become experts in these matters. I have developed the reward method, however small, for achieving on a daily basis the most mundane houshold tasks, which are both repetitive and soul destroying, and are also good at encouraging the art of procrastination! So...in order to encourage productivity, chocolate figures quite a lot in my daily life, well it is my raison d'être and it makes it even more of a valid excuse if I can say that I have to suffer greatly before I can have some, it also takes away the guilt 🤣
As for French, one of my best and most favourite subjects at school and which I have begun actively learning again. Thankyou kindly for the tips regarding gender, I found using Mrs Vandertramp for the être verbs to be extremely helpful.
Interestingly, I was supposed to be writing a script but then I read your piece instead. By the time I was done with that, the script had miraculously... Oh, no it hadn't, it's still not written.
Mar 4, 2023·edited Mar 4, 2023Liked by Michael Marshall Smith
When I was learning to write code back in the 90s we were given a tedious task of using our skills to do something useless, like open 10 browser windows, each displaying a different URL. At the time, I did not feel like learning the techniques to do that, so I decided to write something that would do it for me.
I spent the next week diving into things we hadn't learned yet, discovering for loops and arrays of strings. I was in another world that week and the outcome was better than I expected. You clicked a button on a page and out came 10 windows. I even added a feature to enter custom URLs.
I spent 10 times as much energy on something to avoid 2 times as much energy on. My workaround not only included what I was trying to avoid, but also gave me a huge burst of learning and motivation.
I have a fervent resistance to planning any of my design work. I put this down to the horrifying trauma of creating endless mood boards and preliminary sketches while at uni. In fact, quite often I created the things after the finished piece, reverse-engineering physical evidence of a thought process. Of course, by starting blind, all of the planning IS happening, I just means I scrap, restart, abandon, swear, restart again, endlessly move stuff around, abandon again and then start on the final thing. I just have little evidence that this happened.
I liked your ‘spurious carrot’ - great phrase. I got myself into practising mindfulness, after repeatedly failing and berating myself, by lowering the bar to one minute. Then 2, then 5 then 10. I now often manage 20 minute sittings. My mind couldn’t really argue with a 1 minute session (although it did enjoy questioning the point), and it helped get me started.
I learned a lot about history, and gained an interest in it, by joining the Society for Creative Anachronism. Yes, we got a lot wrong, but I also developed an interest in history that had been crushed out of me in high school. I'm also a skilled calligrapher, using the tools and materials used by scribes in the eighth through sixteenth centuries. And I look cool in armor.
My high school chemistry experience was interesting. I set the curve the first three quarters of the class where it was all book work, but when it came to actually mixing chemicals... No explosions, but a lot of overflow of dangerous chemicals. The final for the class was receiving a solution, everyone gets a different one, and figuring out what was in it. If you made a mistake and damaged your sample, too bad. You failed. Guess who made a mistake and damaged her sample? But the teacher gave me a new vial, and I figured out (mostly) what was in it. That quarter was the only B I got in high school, but the class was graded as a semester class, so it counted as an A.
Ah, school. The things it did and didn't prepare us for. Chemistry class taught me I would never be a cook. I married well.
I lost my joy for creating illustrations shortly after discovering Instagram! There were so many people out there better than me and I foolishly let it put me off for nearly a decade. After discovering David Shrigley’s work and loving his sense of humour I convinced myself that my stuff didn’t need to be the ‘polished’ work I loved so much. I enjoy hand lettering and inappropriate swearing and decided one day to just do a load of card designs, not worry excessively about how they look - print them, and see if anyone buys them. Many people have done since, and, although I often feel like a big fake, I get such a thrill when I see a sale come through for one of my designs. The simplicity/laziness of my creations and the lack of preciousness I feel towards them is now a big part of my motivation to keep producing.
Because I was so unmotivated to do ANY schoolwork, whether or not I enjoyed the subject, I used to do nearly all my work last-minute to impose some urgency on myself. By Sixth Form, because I'd discovered pubs in the evenings, writing essays the night before had turned into writing essays the morning they were due, during the 30 minutes of registration before classes started. I learned to quickly judge what the expected learning outcome of a particular set question was, and demonstrate it as concisely as possible, in as little time as possible, surrounded by the distraction of a class full of noisy teenagers, while sometimes suffering a hangover. I didn't realise that I'd essentially taught myself how to shine under the pressure of the exam conditions which crushed many others much more intelligent/engaged in their learning than me (and, which, back then, 80-90% of one's grade was based on).
I couldn't do the same at uni, because essays needed so much more research and organisation, but I figured out another strategy to pass exams while doing as little work as possible. It should come as no surprise that I have only retained about 0.5% of the information that I learned during my education.
Eerily topical… Currently attempting to trick my brain into finishing edits on a bunch of half-done stories. So far, the most successful trick to keep perfection paralysis at bay has been to work as fast as possible (even if that means it’s a bit sloppy and will require an extra however-many-more passes). If I stop to think too hard about what I’m doing, that’s it; the magic’s over and I turn back into a pumpkin.
Also, unrelated: ‘My Wife and Other Bastards’ would be a hell of a title for… something.
Computer Gaming. Christ, it taught me how to adult.
Having a compulsive special interest of gaming, finding out the rules to exploit them but needing some story as well to keep my imagination going, found fertile ground in the role-playing, sci-fi and fantasy club at university. I found my people, we played pen and paper roleplaying games and I modelled social skills and interactions. 'Cos, that wasn't something I was great at.
It was imaginative avoidance of the courses that I was enrolled in, with and had the appropriate level of failure attached. I did finish my degree, and my stubbornness about doing science and becoming a scientist, I did end up with a doctorate in chemistry (Loving the Smith-Rogers error).
I got myself a post-doc in foreign lands, but I was away from my crew of storytelling freaks. I could never get into MMORPGS, they were a grind not a story. Then a mate pointed to EVE-online, single server persistent world. The characters are now impacting a persistent world. Sure, you were an immortal cloned meatsack, your mind backed up, and acted as the control core for spaceships that were kilometres in dimensions, but that suited me fine. I would rather be a spaceship on most days. This was something I could role-play, have goals and an impact. I was going somewhere, not just grinding for levels.
Of course, it is only a little what before you want to buy some shiny new guns for your newbie ship, opening the market interface and clicking around was an eye opener. There was fully dynamic market, a mature economy with supply and demand graphs, Donchian channels (WTF is that?). I grabbed my guns and ran away. OK, I will maybe look at that later…
Some years later, I get another post-doc in a new foreign land, and I have played through several different roles and sub games in EVE. A few of my colleges (in game) were keen to enter the market selling goods that only existed if characters made them and asked if I was interested. It was a whole market analysis, supply demand, spreadsheets, people will pay for what it is worth to them, inventory, purchase orders in market hubs, shipping goods for manufacture, and high value items to market, all the time possibly being targeted by space pirate or enemy corporations. It required a constant gardening style of play, an hour morning and evening. It was successful. We were running a business. This business was supporting a war against those that world enslave us!
The game had tricked me into the grind of running a small business with business partners.
So, the roleplaying let me model social behaviour, the EVE let me model small business. Yay, I can adult now!
As an undergrad, I designed college courses at Western Illinois University that used reinforcement as a tool for learning. It was a student funded group called the Centre for Innovative Design and Programmed Instruction (CIDPI).
We also had a Learning Lab classroom that had audiovisual equipment and programmed textbooks. We even had a hologram display. I sometimes helped students with questions they may have had.
I remember sitting at a carrel with headphones on listening to Jefferson Airplane, in preparation for a test, when a famous learning psychologist from Western Michigan walked in, noticed me smiling and smiled back.
Loved this! I once taught a particularly competitive group of young saxophone players who developed a tendency to rush in an attempt to "outplay" their classmates. They despised the metronome I used to rein them in until I discovered a metronome setting on the electronic keyboard that barked (yes, as in barked like a dog). From that day forward, they demanded to use the metronome at every lesson. Only downside? I got a lot of calls from teachers in nearby classrooms asking me if I had a dog in my room. :) Although I love retirement, I do miss working with kids.
Interesting. Reading your piece, I was reminded of part of Robert Heinlein's 'Time Enough for Love'. 'The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail' was one of many stories recounted by the protagonist, Lazarus Long. Loosely based on Heinlein's own experiences at the US Naval Academy, the parable tells of a young officer cadet who realised that many of the mundane tasks he was assigned could be done more efficiently. This "laziness" resulted not only in him having more time to do whatever he wanted, but also in his repeated promotion through the ranks and later, in civilian life, in becoming a millionaire.
The story, of course, is typical of Heinlein's "competent libertarian" ethos but, for me, it also generated the insight that a lot of human progress and invention could be viewed through the same lens. Laziness, or more charitably, the desire to find a more efficient way to do something, has driven technological advances from the wheel to quantum computing and many more besides.
On a personal note, I've always had a compulsion to find the most efficient way of performing a task. Even as a bus driver, despite the apparent monotony of driving the same routes over and over again, I'm still finding ways to get to the end of my route in a more timely, more comfortable or sometimes more elegant way. I flatter myself that this isn't laziness on my part, but rather an indication of my slightly compulsive nature...
Well...I avoid the "cocktail hour" and the "Mother's ruin" approach...sounds like a plan though, if the UK ever runs out of chocolate, quite possible in our post brexit state. 😉
Well, every year at work I am forced to take the same or similar online courses in GDPR, Health & Safety, Driver Safety Awareness etc. I learnt very quickly that by taking a photo on my phone of each slide, I could reduce the 1hr death by PowerPoint to about 15 minutes, but then comes the dreaded quiz. It forces me to go back and read the slides to find the answers as I need at least 80% to pass. So it still takes me up to an hour, I still learn but somehow it feels quicker because I have taken a shortcut.
By having two or three projects on the go, I inevitably hit a procrastination point on one of them, so I use the time I "shouldn't" be working on one of those other things to do it as a displacement activity. Until I hit a procrastination point on *it* too. And round it goes, until enough time pressure comes up on the first project that I have to go back and do the bit I was originally procrastinating on (usually it is just boring and takes five annoying painful minutes).
I think women have become experts in these matters. I have developed the reward method, however small, for achieving on a daily basis the most mundane houshold tasks, which are both repetitive and soul destroying, and are also good at encouraging the art of procrastination! So...in order to encourage productivity, chocolate figures quite a lot in my daily life, well it is my raison d'être and it makes it even more of a valid excuse if I can say that I have to suffer greatly before I can have some, it also takes away the guilt 🤣
As for French, one of my best and most favourite subjects at school and which I have begun actively learning again. Thankyou kindly for the tips regarding gender, I found using Mrs Vandertramp for the être verbs to be extremely helpful.
Interestingly, I was supposed to be writing a script but then I read your piece instead. By the time I was done with that, the script had miraculously... Oh, no it hadn't, it's still not written.
When I was learning to write code back in the 90s we were given a tedious task of using our skills to do something useless, like open 10 browser windows, each displaying a different URL. At the time, I did not feel like learning the techniques to do that, so I decided to write something that would do it for me.
I spent the next week diving into things we hadn't learned yet, discovering for loops and arrays of strings. I was in another world that week and the outcome was better than I expected. You clicked a button on a page and out came 10 windows. I even added a feature to enter custom URLs.
I spent 10 times as much energy on something to avoid 2 times as much energy on. My workaround not only included what I was trying to avoid, but also gave me a huge burst of learning and motivation.
I have a fervent resistance to planning any of my design work. I put this down to the horrifying trauma of creating endless mood boards and preliminary sketches while at uni. In fact, quite often I created the things after the finished piece, reverse-engineering physical evidence of a thought process. Of course, by starting blind, all of the planning IS happening, I just means I scrap, restart, abandon, swear, restart again, endlessly move stuff around, abandon again and then start on the final thing. I just have little evidence that this happened.
I liked your ‘spurious carrot’ - great phrase. I got myself into practising mindfulness, after repeatedly failing and berating myself, by lowering the bar to one minute. Then 2, then 5 then 10. I now often manage 20 minute sittings. My mind couldn’t really argue with a 1 minute session (although it did enjoy questioning the point), and it helped get me started.
I learned a lot about history, and gained an interest in it, by joining the Society for Creative Anachronism. Yes, we got a lot wrong, but I also developed an interest in history that had been crushed out of me in high school. I'm also a skilled calligrapher, using the tools and materials used by scribes in the eighth through sixteenth centuries. And I look cool in armor.
My high school chemistry experience was interesting. I set the curve the first three quarters of the class where it was all book work, but when it came to actually mixing chemicals... No explosions, but a lot of overflow of dangerous chemicals. The final for the class was receiving a solution, everyone gets a different one, and figuring out what was in it. If you made a mistake and damaged your sample, too bad. You failed. Guess who made a mistake and damaged her sample? But the teacher gave me a new vial, and I figured out (mostly) what was in it. That quarter was the only B I got in high school, but the class was graded as a semester class, so it counted as an A.
Ah, school. The things it did and didn't prepare us for. Chemistry class taught me I would never be a cook. I married well.
I lost my joy for creating illustrations shortly after discovering Instagram! There were so many people out there better than me and I foolishly let it put me off for nearly a decade. After discovering David Shrigley’s work and loving his sense of humour I convinced myself that my stuff didn’t need to be the ‘polished’ work I loved so much. I enjoy hand lettering and inappropriate swearing and decided one day to just do a load of card designs, not worry excessively about how they look - print them, and see if anyone buys them. Many people have done since, and, although I often feel like a big fake, I get such a thrill when I see a sale come through for one of my designs. The simplicity/laziness of my creations and the lack of preciousness I feel towards them is now a big part of my motivation to keep producing.
Because I was so unmotivated to do ANY schoolwork, whether or not I enjoyed the subject, I used to do nearly all my work last-minute to impose some urgency on myself. By Sixth Form, because I'd discovered pubs in the evenings, writing essays the night before had turned into writing essays the morning they were due, during the 30 minutes of registration before classes started. I learned to quickly judge what the expected learning outcome of a particular set question was, and demonstrate it as concisely as possible, in as little time as possible, surrounded by the distraction of a class full of noisy teenagers, while sometimes suffering a hangover. I didn't realise that I'd essentially taught myself how to shine under the pressure of the exam conditions which crushed many others much more intelligent/engaged in their learning than me (and, which, back then, 80-90% of one's grade was based on).
I couldn't do the same at uni, because essays needed so much more research and organisation, but I figured out another strategy to pass exams while doing as little work as possible. It should come as no surprise that I have only retained about 0.5% of the information that I learned during my education.
Eerily topical… Currently attempting to trick my brain into finishing edits on a bunch of half-done stories. So far, the most successful trick to keep perfection paralysis at bay has been to work as fast as possible (even if that means it’s a bit sloppy and will require an extra however-many-more passes). If I stop to think too hard about what I’m doing, that’s it; the magic’s over and I turn back into a pumpkin.
Also, unrelated: ‘My Wife and Other Bastards’ would be a hell of a title for… something.
Computer Gaming. Christ, it taught me how to adult.
Having a compulsive special interest of gaming, finding out the rules to exploit them but needing some story as well to keep my imagination going, found fertile ground in the role-playing, sci-fi and fantasy club at university. I found my people, we played pen and paper roleplaying games and I modelled social skills and interactions. 'Cos, that wasn't something I was great at.
It was imaginative avoidance of the courses that I was enrolled in, with and had the appropriate level of failure attached. I did finish my degree, and my stubbornness about doing science and becoming a scientist, I did end up with a doctorate in chemistry (Loving the Smith-Rogers error).
I got myself a post-doc in foreign lands, but I was away from my crew of storytelling freaks. I could never get into MMORPGS, they were a grind not a story. Then a mate pointed to EVE-online, single server persistent world. The characters are now impacting a persistent world. Sure, you were an immortal cloned meatsack, your mind backed up, and acted as the control core for spaceships that were kilometres in dimensions, but that suited me fine. I would rather be a spaceship on most days. This was something I could role-play, have goals and an impact. I was going somewhere, not just grinding for levels.
Of course, it is only a little what before you want to buy some shiny new guns for your newbie ship, opening the market interface and clicking around was an eye opener. There was fully dynamic market, a mature economy with supply and demand graphs, Donchian channels (WTF is that?). I grabbed my guns and ran away. OK, I will maybe look at that later…
Some years later, I get another post-doc in a new foreign land, and I have played through several different roles and sub games in EVE. A few of my colleges (in game) were keen to enter the market selling goods that only existed if characters made them and asked if I was interested. It was a whole market analysis, supply demand, spreadsheets, people will pay for what it is worth to them, inventory, purchase orders in market hubs, shipping goods for manufacture, and high value items to market, all the time possibly being targeted by space pirate or enemy corporations. It required a constant gardening style of play, an hour morning and evening. It was successful. We were running a business. This business was supporting a war against those that world enslave us!
The game had tricked me into the grind of running a small business with business partners.
So, the roleplaying let me model social behaviour, the EVE let me model small business. Yay, I can adult now!
As an undergrad, I designed college courses at Western Illinois University that used reinforcement as a tool for learning. It was a student funded group called the Centre for Innovative Design and Programmed Instruction (CIDPI).
We also had a Learning Lab classroom that had audiovisual equipment and programmed textbooks. We even had a hologram display. I sometimes helped students with questions they may have had.
I remember sitting at a carrel with headphones on listening to Jefferson Airplane, in preparation for a test, when a famous learning psychologist from Western Michigan walked in, noticed me smiling and smiled back.
Loved this! I once taught a particularly competitive group of young saxophone players who developed a tendency to rush in an attempt to "outplay" their classmates. They despised the metronome I used to rein them in until I discovered a metronome setting on the electronic keyboard that barked (yes, as in barked like a dog). From that day forward, they demanded to use the metronome at every lesson. Only downside? I got a lot of calls from teachers in nearby classrooms asking me if I had a dog in my room. :) Although I love retirement, I do miss working with kids.
Interesting. Reading your piece, I was reminded of part of Robert Heinlein's 'Time Enough for Love'. 'The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail' was one of many stories recounted by the protagonist, Lazarus Long. Loosely based on Heinlein's own experiences at the US Naval Academy, the parable tells of a young officer cadet who realised that many of the mundane tasks he was assigned could be done more efficiently. This "laziness" resulted not only in him having more time to do whatever he wanted, but also in his repeated promotion through the ranks and later, in civilian life, in becoming a millionaire.
The story, of course, is typical of Heinlein's "competent libertarian" ethos but, for me, it also generated the insight that a lot of human progress and invention could be viewed through the same lens. Laziness, or more charitably, the desire to find a more efficient way to do something, has driven technological advances from the wheel to quantum computing and many more besides.
On a personal note, I've always had a compulsion to find the most efficient way of performing a task. Even as a bus driver, despite the apparent monotony of driving the same routes over and over again, I'm still finding ways to get to the end of my route in a more timely, more comfortable or sometimes more elegant way. I flatter myself that this isn't laziness on my part, but rather an indication of my slightly compulsive nature...
Well...I avoid the "cocktail hour" and the "Mother's ruin" approach...sounds like a plan though, if the UK ever runs out of chocolate, quite possible in our post brexit state. 😉
Well, every year at work I am forced to take the same or similar online courses in GDPR, Health & Safety, Driver Safety Awareness etc. I learnt very quickly that by taking a photo on my phone of each slide, I could reduce the 1hr death by PowerPoint to about 15 minutes, but then comes the dreaded quiz. It forces me to go back and read the slides to find the answers as I need at least 80% to pass. So it still takes me up to an hour, I still learn but somehow it feels quicker because I have taken a shortcut.