My name is Amy and I am a Procrastinator.

Here's a great way to procrastinate - take this survey on procrastination. Much to my dismay (but, unfortunately, not surprise) I am an above average procrastinator, hitting 67 on a scale of 100.

You rank between the top 25% and 10% in terms of procrastination. That is, when it comes to putting things off, you often do so even though you know you shouldn’t. Likely, you are more free-spirited and spontaneous than most. Probably, your work doesn’t engage you as much as you would like or perhaps you are surrounded by easily available and more pleasant temptations. These temptations may initially seem rewarding, but in the longer-term, you see many of them as time-wasters. Though you likely often still get your work done, there is probably a lot of last minute panicking and unwanted stress. You may want to reduce what procrastination you do commit.

Yikes. I like to think I'm a pretty responsible person (after all, I've been reasonably successful in a number of areas of my life), and that my procrastination is due in large part to my current occupation as a student. The line "your work doesn't engage you as much as you would like" rang very true to me. When I'm doing things I enjoy, or find engaging, I still procrastinate but not nearly as much. When I was teaching, I still sometimes put things off, but I was much better at getting things done and feeling productive, and I wanted to get things done.

The article that linked me to this survey also talked about how procrastination is increasing because people have more unstructured time, and that is definitely a problem for me. This semester I have no structure three out of five days of the week, and I hate it. To be perfectly honest, I would rather be really, really busy and not know when I was going to get everything done. It's one of the reasons I keep going through crises and wanting to quit grad school and go teach, where I know what I have to do and when I have to do it. Teaching is at least as stressful as grad school, but it's an entirely different kind of stress.

One of the things I was working on last semester was reducing distractions. I find that I have an awful lot of things to distract me (I think I've written about this before), and the great majority of those involve the internet, which is a problem because I spend so much time on my computer, and almost always have internet access thanks to wireless connections. A quick decision to take two minutes to check my email or Facebook or blogs or the New York Times online can turn into a half hour or more. (For example, I might check the New York Times, then follow a link to a survey about procrastination, then take the survey, then go blog about it, and suddenly I am no longer even thinking about that textbook analysis I was working on.)

One thing I occasionally do is go study in the Institute building. This is not really just for a change of venue, but also because there is no wireless internet access there. I think the main trick to avoiding procrastination is to create spaces in which you work and only work, and to spend certain amounts of time in those spaces. I got better at doing that last semester - I'm slacking this first week back at school, but next week I think I'll be more settled into my routine and I want to start working at disconnecting myself from distractions and creating work-only spaces.

This is also an issue of priorities. Sometimes I feel like there's something wrong with me because I don't put school high enough on my priority list. There are so many other things that matter. I make sure I have time for running and sleeping and spending time with friends and working at the temple and attending church functions and sitting down for my meals, and I think those are all good things. I am not willing to give any of them up, and I often perceive that as a problem, because how can I possibly fit school in when there's so much else that I find equally important, and much more rewarding? But when I say that as a reason why I may not be as devoted to school as I sometimes ought to be, I'm not being completely honest with myself, because it's not sleep or exercise or friends or church that are eating away at my school time (or not usually). It's first because my time and the nature of my work is so unstructured, and second the little distractions that happen throughout the day, and since I can't change the fact that my time and work is unstructured for the near future, those little distractions are really where I need to put my effort at simplifying.

And so now I'm going to stop procrastinating for the rest of the afternoon and sign off my blog.