Author: Brian Tenecela (Page 5 of 7)

My plan to re-read is going to be to pay closer attention to every detail that I come across while reading and also try to go in a little depth with the annotating. Also, I figured that by doing so I would be able to get a further understanding of everything as well to better anticipate for future work I go over. I feel that by re-reading I am able to have another opportunity to read and actually enjoy specific details and events that come about.

After having reread and annotated later I was more particularly paying closer attention to the various evidence he was using and/or bringing into his writing on the topic of procrastination. I noticed that it primarily was a narrative of an economist George Akerlof on how he meant to ship something but made a connection that something else shipped more rapidly. While rereading I noticed that the author uses higher level vocabulary that personally felt like it aided in his confidence and power while writing on procrastination. A few examples of the high-level words the author uses are “lamenting”, “quintessential”, “perplexing”, etc. This was rather key since it just adds the fundamentals to his writing and just gives the author a sense of credibility from my perspective. In addition, I was also able to notice that the author was immersive on the detail that was being shared on the topic of procrastination one example was when he stated, “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”. Not only does the author bring in a relevant figure into the subject of procrastination but also the data gathered from a collective questionnaire also brings in the historical part by bringing in dates and correlating that to procrastination. Which in this case was over how procrastination has grown over the year periods of 1978 to 2002. In doing so this promptly informs the reader with statistical facts and the time period that procrastination has worsened since there are more people who feel that it occurs. Another great example, the author uses is “That’s why David Allen, the author of the best-selling time management book “Getting Things Done,”…the vaguer the task, or the more abstract the thinking it requires, the less likely you are to finish it”. This information the author uses towards the end was key to concluding his writing since through adding evidence on procrastination, it also gives the essential summary to what procrastination is which is to delay tasks/objectives till later which eventually will need to be done but rather just leave it for the last second to deal with.

– Brian Tenecela

After reading the article Later by James Surowiecki I found the article really interesting as it explored the depth of procrastination and I was able to relate to it since I’ve also undergone procrastination in my earlier years of school.  However, I was starting to get a little upset because the author was bringing in some historical information more so than elaborating on procrastination and some examples that could’ve perhaps been followed up on. One really great part I loved from the article was when he mentioned a two-stage experiment where people were offered a choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow. Later in stage two, they were offered the choice between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In the end, people chose to receive the money sooner in the first stage but in the second stage, they decided to wait it out. In the end, it concluded that the long-term goals and short-term goals as well as consideration affect their choices. This example the author used I stood greatly with because before that the author stated on page 3 “Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off”. Having this said prior to the statement of the two-stage experiment just went hand and hand. I felt that his writing style and formatting were simply great but like I mentioned previously I would’ve liked more if that statement and evidence analysis he did great with matching his historical views. His organization was simply put right as far as explaining the notion of procrastination, he did touch back on what exactly procrastination was which he portrayed to be when someone gets a load of work/stuff to do and as a result of starting to slowly work on it, they leave it to be dealt on with later on. On page 6 he quotes philosopher Mark Kingwell “Procrasination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing…Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question of wether anything is worth doing at all”. Again the article in my opinion was greatly formatted and the author did a great job of obtaining evidence that deals with procrastination and matching that with examples the audience can pick up on with the potential of relating to.