Procrastination...

...is quite a bastard. It's been a double edged sword for me. One hand, I try to get something done and it just doesn't seem to want to happen, so I get distracted with other things. On the other hand, I tend to get a lot of those other things done. So where the original work hasn't been done, I've got a few other things sorted. My idea now is if I do something pointless and unimportant but that I really don't want to do, all my important things will get done. Works in theory?

I'm rarely ever later for meetings or appointments. I sometimes forget I've got them outright, but when I do remember, I'm there on time or early. So why do I have so much trouble with deadlines? Maybe it's because there isn't someone there in front of you saying "You're late, you bastard!"

My most time consuming distractions lately have been:

Twitter - you'd think that only have 140 characters to write in would mean you don't spend that much time on there. Well, I have TwitterFox, a little icon in the bottom right that pops up every now and then when someone sends a "tweet". I have an annoying compulsion everytime I see the Twitter icon with a numeral next to it to see who's posted what. Most of the time it's pointless crap or references to something I have no bloody clue about, yet somehow it's all still quite fascinating.

Facebook - somewhat similar to Twitter, anytime I get a notification, I have to check it out, even though 90% of the time it's someone making an inane comment on someone's status I commented on, or some bollocks quiz such as "which finger am I?". Who is that bored that they'll sit there and do a quiz to find out what finger on their hand they are? How is this going to enrich their life? Personally I hope I'm in the middle finger. I shouldn't need to explain that one.

Disgaea DS - anyone who knows me knows I love my games. Anyone who knows me better knows I can kill hours on these things. There are certain timesink games, ones with extra content that can steal your soul. Disgaea is one of the worst for this, as apart from having the main game, you have ridiculous amounts of customisation, and plenty of goals to aim for. As a general hint to anyone who plays and understands RPGs, the level cap is usuall 100, right? In Disgaea, the level cap is 9999, and that's not counting the fact that you can reset your character to level 1 and gain some extra benefits.

24 Hours, 24 Lives - my new book has been somewhat time consuming. Organising has been the biggest time devourer so far. Everyone now and then I've taken the time out to sit and do little tables on Excel and scribble all sorts of notes down. Now, this is a beneficial form of procrastination, but rather ironic considering that without the course I'm doing now for which I'm meant to be finishing an assignment, I wouldn't even be writing that book.

Other odd procrastination distractions were eating, drinking, breathing etc, all of which were somewhere in there. So, tell me, what keeps you from doing the things you need to get done?