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the value of procrastination
Monday, March 12 2018
One of the joys of the sort of work I do comes when I take some system and find a way to generalize it. Doing so comes as a minor form of the ecstasy Albert Einstein must've experienced when he expanded upon the principles of Special Relativity to produce General Relativity. For me, it comes when I can take a software system elaborately and specifically built for one environment and transplant it (sometimes forgetting some pieces along the way and going back for them) into another, perhaps with new configurations to turn on some new features while turning off others that no longer apply. I had that experience today, though getting there was occasionally painful, particularly when part of the transition involves moving to a more up-to-date operating system with, say, new layers of security and a certain amount of feature shuffling.
Our fiend Carrie came over this afternoon to pay her condolences for our loss of Janet the Cat. She'd baked a loaf of bread for the occasion, and it was the first bread she'd ever baked. It was warm and everything bread should be (though, admittedly, the carbs were emptier than they might otherwise have been, since she'd used white flour).
I've been continuing to read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Antifragile, following several different "bookmarks" that started in random places (and are maintained on different devices). It hardly matters where one begins or ends, since the book is not especially well-organized. It mostly consists of a series of tales about the arrogance humans in the face of a fundamentally unpredictable world. An interesting point I read this evening concerned the value of procrastination. If procrastination were a bad thing, we would probably not do it as much as we do. Indeed, as Taleb points out, we most definitely don't do it when there is an emergency of any sort. But if I'm procrastinating something, especially a workplace task, there might well be a good reason to do so, particularly if conditions suddenly change and it becomes obvious that the procrastinated task never needed to be done in the first place. I've managed to avoid a fair amount of unnecessary work by paying attention to my desire not to do it.
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