Category: Waffle

Procrastination Progress Report

I think it’s safe to assume that everyone has the context of this post, but just in case the hyperlink to the context is provided at absolutely no extra cost (twice).

If you’re reading this then it’s quite obvious that I’m doing well at the “writing blog entries” task. It is no longer being procrastinated.

Obvious drawback is that other things are. Although, it’s not really that serious considering it’s the weekend. So, if I avoided blogging, then I’d should be working, but I’m not going to do any work on the weekend.

Of course, that means I should skip work and look at Project A.
Nah, skip that too.

Project B: looking good kids.
In earlier discussions with Quinn it was decided that I should incentivise myself by issuing the gifts to recipients as they are completed. Since this behaviour could result in certain people getting upset because “they didn’t get one,” it forces me to actually complete all of the gifts.
Further, we decided that they would be distributed in batches. The first batch has already shipped. The second batch is almost ready to ship (one story left to write, but I know what to write). This means I wrote one story and conceptualised another. Productivity people!
Now, there is some concern that this particular batch might require an additional item, in order to avoid disappointment. So scratch that: two stories to write, but one already conceptualised and the weekend is but young.

Chess: I have played quite a bit today, happily avoiding other activities. I’ve discovered a rather amusing variant that they play on FICS, called “Atomic Chess.”
Now that’s an allusion to the atomic bomb because when you capture a piece, it “explodes,” removing the captured piece, itself, and all adjacent pieces from the board (with the exception of pawns, which stay behind). Now, if you don’t really play chess much, this won’t be of that much interest. But let me just say this: I feel a more apt name for the variant would be “Suicide Bomber Chess,” because there are no ballistic-missile pieces in chess.
That’s a useful piece you’re blowing up when you make a capture.

Unrelated (although not, since it is procrastination but not part of the structure): I’ve spawned a halfhaggis Flickr account. It has a couple of photos up that a posted to test whether F-spot integrated with it properly. It does. I’m mighty pleased because it’s so easy.
Perhaps I’ll start spewing out photos there on a regular basis. At least then, those who care, have a chance of actually seeing some my photos.

Playing chess again and its role in productivity

So it seems I may have rekindled an interest in playing chess on-line. Surely, this can’t possibly have anything to do with a previous post regarding why I’m not blogging as much.

No, I didn’t think so. Surely I’ve not taken up the chess again in order to avoid Personal Project B, which surely wasn’t devised in order to avoid Personal Project A?
And surely neither Personal Project A, nor B were devised in order to avoid Work?
And surely, this blogging I’m doing now hasn’t been implemented in order to avoid all previously mentioned activities?

To be entirely frank, I have finally devised a sufficiently complex web of tasks that will allow me to properly implement the concept of structured procrastination.

Elaboration
Work
I have work to do, which I’m paid to do.
Work consists of a number of sub-tasks. These sub-tasks are:

  • Work for clients (billable hours, which earns the company, and consequently me, money)
  • Administration/innovation (non-billable time which earns the company nothing — at least not directly )

I group administration and innovation together simply because they don’t directly earn me any money. I tend to prefer to do tasks in the second category. During office hours, those should be the only activities I should be carrying out.
If you know anything about structured procrastination you’ll know that there aren’t enough categories of things to do for the procrastinator (a.k.a me) to actually get anything done.

This is why Project A was initiated. Project A is effectively “write a novel.” It was, “write a novel in 30 days” but I hadn’t fully established my structured procrastination web at the time, and so didn’t quite finish in time.

Project A
Project A is ostensibly an after hours project. In other words, something I will never work on at the office. Pfffft.

Thus, the next procrastination layer is set in place. Project A, although predominantly worked on at home, occasionally is used at the office as part of the structured procrastination strategy.

Unfortunately, I soon found that I was struggling to work on Project A as much as I’d like to. Writing a novel seemed a little overwhelming. It’s a lot of words, and they all need to relate to each other in some way. I can’t just write randomly generated words. That would leave me with a novel-sized piece of spam.
Evidently, to avoid writing the longer story, it would make sense to write shorter stories. Thus, the birth of Project B.

Project B
Project B, as I have now given away, is a writing project. If you know me well enough, that would probably have been fairly obvious. I will spend time writing a gift for people. The gift will be the writing, and it will also be the time I spent writing it.

So, the gift that spawns from Project B is something I created while avoiding doing something else. It could be argued that this fact devalues the gift. To that I counter with, “Next time I’ll just browse meaningless crap on the internet, and your gift will be me telling you ‘I browsed meaningless crap on the internet, for you.'”

FICS (Free Internet Chess Server)
As if that’s not enough, I suddenly remembered that I used to play chess a lot, and I thought I should try out the FICS again.
I originally signed up in 1998, but never played on-line that much then. The not even 28k modem might have had something to do with that — also my irrational fear of having to interact with strangers (even anonymous ones). Sometimes they wanted to chat, and not just play chess. The horror!

having got over those hang-ups, I’ve started playing again. At home and at work, during my breaks (honest). Of course, my breaks seem to get a little extensive sometimes.
Gloriously, this allows me to side-step the inconvenience of always writing things. The structure of my procrastination is heavily weighted towards writing things. The chess allows me to break that monotony, just a little.

Re-cap
Let’s review what we’ve learned so far today:
Avoid work by doing admin.
Avoid admin by doing Project A.
Avoid Project A by doing Project B.
Avoid Project B by logging in to FICS.

Closing the loop
Now, the clear problem is finding something to avoid that will make me want to do work instead.
What I’ve described so far isn’t, strictly speaking, structured procrastination. But so what. This is my take on it.

To close the loop, I need to do something to avoid playing chess. Now, I’d rather play chess than work — so that’s not going to cut it.
So, I bring blogging into the equation. Following on the logic that I stopped blogging for a while, but wanted to blog more regularly than I had been, it’s clear that I was procrastinating posting new entries. This is excellent news indeed.

I hereby set the completely unrealistic goal of posting a useful entry every week day. I know there’s no way I’ll be able to stick to that, but I assert that I must do it. It’s important.

Now, in order to avoid blogging everyday, I’ll do some work, thus closing the loop.

Enquiring Minds want to know

The blog isn’t dead, it merely stands dormant.

I hear you argue that Satan’s Poodle is dormant too. I’ll level with you on that — Satan’s Poodle is edging towards extinction. Although it may be revived, don’t count on it until I finish other projects I’ve set for myself. More on that shortly.
Anyway, Waffle Group ain’t the poodle, so those enquiring minds need not fret about Waffle Group’s endangerment.

There are a number of reasons why this blog is unlikely to be updated regularly for a while, but things will trickle in from time to time.

  1. Work: The new year has brought me many work-related projects and I’m likely to be very busy during the day. No time to stuff about on the intertubes. Or rather, less time.
  2. Personal Project A: Commitment Man! After work, there might be some free time available to me, but if I’m going to be writing, I should be writing Commitment Man. Words written on the blog could’ve been added to my manuscript. You may have heard of this before under the title “NanoWriMo.” Of course, November is long since gone and my word count still hasn’t reached 50,000. Still, I never really expected to get things finished in a month. I did expect it to give me a kick-start, and ultimately I do expect to finish.
  3. Personal Project B: Novel Christmas Presents: I have stumbled upon a cunning idea for Xmas gifts. Or rather, was inspired to create certain gifts for people who I care for, know relatively well, and believe will appreciate them. I also concluded that there isn’t necessarily a need to wait until Christmas to give someone important a gift. Gifts can be given at any random time. I believe that a gift of my time will be particularly meaningful. So, I’m using my time to customise gifts for many of you. Once all gifts are completed, I will distribute them. The care-takers of Bug Unit have already received theirs, because they were buggering off to the UK (and now have done so).

So now, enquiring minds know.

Stay the patient course — for yourself (In your pants?)

In the course of my work, I make use of the South African Agricultural Geo-Referenced System dynamic map service.

Today the service was down. It told me this:

Stay the patient course
of little worth is your ire,
the map service, is down.Please try again later.

I hope they randomise it so that you don’t get the same message over and over. Otherwise, staying the patient course may rapidly become troublesome.

Much like the case with Cell C. They’ve recently redone their webpage, and appear to have contracted possums for the job. Whenever I log in and try to access my account info, I get this message:

here i am scratching my head
wondering what happened. . . .
but never fear sometimes life is random. one thousand grovelling pardons for any inconvenience caused.

They issue 1000 pardons because it’s happened about that many times.
Guys, it’s not random if it happens every time!

Nanowrimo Update

Okay, so things aren’t exactly looking optimal.
I laugh in the face of unattainable word counts!

Fear not fans! Writing continues steadily, if not at the blistering pace required to meet certain self-imposed deadlines. There will be a silly novel. It’ll just take a while longer.

In other news, Angie celebrated her birthday yesterday in style — pics should be forthcoming. Complain if there aren’t any before the end of the week.

Nano update

Vaguely feel like I can win now. This weekend has been mildly successful. Not marvellously successful, but better than the previous weekend. I should have written many many many more words to make up for reduced output during the week. At least I wrote over 2000 words per day on Saturday and Sunday — which proves it’s possible, and not really that difficult. Except, it did take longer than the spare time I have during the week.

If every day was a weekend, 50,000 words in a month would be a doddle. It’s not and it’s not.

My ‘required run-rate’ (to use a cricketing analogy) has creeped up just above 6 runs an over (i.e. 2000 words per day). Not overly taxing yet, but still quite a long chase since I’m not even half-way through the innings yet. If I can keep it at this rate though, I should win easily. But if the rate keeps on creeping up and lurks around 8 runs an over too soon, then I’m sunk. I suppose at least I can’t lose any wickets — but I can lose morale.

Writing quality has already started to deteriorate somewhat. When before I may have been meticulous about spelling and punctuation, I’ve noticed that I’ve been writing vast paragraphs with no regard for whitespace whatsoever. Typos abound. Commas are forgotten. This strategy is likely to be perfected next weekend when the working week takes its toll on my nanowrimo output.

I feel like this post sounds a little like Gaz’s progress reports on his various self-improvement endeavours. Think I see a little better where you were coming from, dude.