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Ye Olde Comments:

My Annoying To-Do List by jonathancanter

A lovely stream-of-conscience reflection on tasks that are necessary but not quite THAT necessary, and on the sadness of the end of summer!

Each year in May or June I promise myself that THIS will be “The Summer of Dave.” That this summer I will have unprecedented amounts of fun, in as many ways as I can devise. Then, inevitably, August sputters into September, I have to start planning for the return of students, I notice that the sun isn’t as high when we are having our morning coffee. There is still heat, but the cool breeze when I leave on my bike for work speaks of long-sleeve shirts and walking the dog in darkness.

And again I realize that yet another summer has somehow gotten away from me.

Precrastination by John Shutkin

I really thought that your story would end with you forgetting to submit the thesis before the deadline!

I used to have the same dream pretty frequently in college and grad school. The odd thing was, it was usually about finding myself in an exam in a subject that I would have a good chance of getting at least a “C” with no study at all (usually History, English Comp or various lit courses). Dreaming of hitting a calculus test w/o intensive cramming; now THAT would have been a nightmare!

Nothing ever has stopped me from procrastinating, though. Still a very bad habit of mine.

Save the Date by Dana Susan Lehrman

Gina and I have been married since 1996, and I STILL keep expecting her to cancel!
They really should have offered to return the gift.

Writing That Paper by Betsy Pfau

Very uplifting. I am completely estranged from most surviving members of my biological family, and was never that close to the rest. OTOH, friends are the family that you get to choose!

Put It Off Until Tomorrow by Suzy

One of the things I have gained by finding this community is speed in writing. The fact of a writing “deadline” gets me off my ass a bit. No idea when I am going to read all the stuff I missed during my mental off-month, though.

Why I Learned to Procrastinate by Marian

This reminds me of a certain Faculty member in my department. Aside from being in inveterate micromanager, he would get OBSESSIVE about…things. Most had NO bearing on him or his work. many involved labs and spaces not even his. But he’d often come up with long laborious projects for me to do that would in the end improve nothing. Eventually I realized that most of the time he would completely forget that he had assigned me the project; they were mainly momentary whims. So I stopped doing the ones I was convinced were of little value, figuring if he did remember I could just play dumb, which he would be happy to believe. This made my job much easier, and until the day he retired, he never actually revisited any of my memory-holed assignments!

Procrastinate Much? by Laurie Levy

I think I have less guilt over my procrastinational nature now because I have concluded that much of what we are expected to attend to just isn’t that important, or time critical. As RA Heinlein said, “90% of everything is crap.”

I try to ID the remaining 10%!