The article for me was interesting and boring at the same time. The whole article was about procrastination and it helped me understand more about it because I really didn’t know what was procrastination before it was spoken about in class and before reading this article. I procrastinate a lot, it is difficult for me to focus and get stuff done, I think about it too much and I say I’m gonna leave it for the next day and sometimes I do get it done but sometimes I don’t. I know this is bad and I got to work on it because it’s going to set me up for failure in the future. In the begging of the article the author was talking about a man named George Akerlof that needed to mail a package to his colleague across the country, however George Akerlof procrastinated about it and said that It was going to take a lot of time of his day to do so, so instead he said he was going to mailed it next week but he never did. Eight months has passed and he still haven’t mailed the package to his colleague. Akerlof find out that a friend was sending some stuff over to the U.S and that’s when he took the opportunity to send the package to his colleague. This part of he article stood out to me because I find that I would be the type to do things like this or similar. In some occasions we’re very busy completing tasks and stuff that needs to get done that we procrastinate about doing other important stuff. In the other hand most of the article was boring to me. They were talking about different ways of procrastination people goes through and the negative outcomes that comes from it.
Category: Difficulty Paper
H.W DP (Diffuculty Paper)
In this article “Later” by James talks about different ways to procrastinate and how it all affects each other. The article talks about how everyone procrastinates no matter who they are and how it affects them. I found the article pretty interesting because I can relate to it when the author states, “ Many of us go through life with an array of undone tasks, large and small, nibbling at our conscience.” This is definitely something many of us can relate to, even the author said it. We all procrastinate no matter who we are. Which I would have never really thought that really EVERYONE procrastinates regardless of who they are. In paragraph 10 James talking about procrastination affected a social scientist Jon Elister talks about not only you procrastinate by using electronics but you also procrastinate by doing other things that need to be done. Something confusing I found is when he talks about different people and they’re perspective on procrastinating. I think for some people including myself it can be a bit confusing but I see where it can be useful and helpful also. Procrastination has been happening for a while now but it has affected people differently including today. I could agree with this part of the article where the author states, “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing.” Which is a situation I can identify with. I feel like I would be aware of how much work I have to get done, but I keep putting it off and finding other things to do.
Homework D.1
What got me confused when reading “Later” by James Surowiecki was when he stated on page 4, “According to Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, the percentage of people who admitted to difficulties with procrastination quadrupled between 1978 and 2002.” This made me wonder if this was an ongoing problem that many had, or if it was recently around this age. At the same time, earlier in that page Surowiecki states, “Ainslie is probably right that procrastination is a basic human impulse, but anxiety about it as a serious problem seems to have emerged in the early modern era.” Based on these pieces of text I have come to the conclusion that his point is that there has always been procrastination but the feeling of anxiety that comes with it is more recent. Something that irked me when reading this was the idea in which we fail to predict the circumstances in leaving a task for later. This was a big slap in the face because of the amount of times I unexpected things have happened but I still leave things for last minute. For instance, Surowiecki writes, “Ignorance might also affect procrastination through what the social scientist Jon Elster calls ‘the planning fallacy.’” The author goes on to talk about how Jon Elster thinks people underestimate the scenarios or events that can unwillingly take place. He also goes on to give us a personal example in which things happened, while he was writing this same paper, that were out of his hands. He states, “Each of these events was, strictly speaking, unexpected, and each took time away from my work. But they were really just the kinds of problems you predictably have to deal with in everyday life.” By doing this, the author had most definitely tied his ideas on the unexpected events or difficulties when putting off a task.
