I read articles to procrastinate more than any other activity. It’s cheap, time-consuming, and allows me to justify it—with no actual verity—by telling myself it’s research of some kind. Just today a few things I read were
- Whether the game “Chinese whispers,” as “telephone” is known in the U.K., is racist (people were mostly unsure, but it is)
- A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you
- Bits of the W3C group AMA on Reddit, scanning for any response to the insertion of a DRM standard directly into the HTML proposal (there was none)
- The artists London was talking about this week
- The history of the guitarrón
- 10 Things You May Not Know About Sitting Bull
- The Wikipedia page for the Tom Servo character on MST3K
…and several other things.
It’s definitely a problem. But possibly a problem I can get a handle on by being more aware of the habit. Chipping away at procrastination is an ongoing practice of reminding my monkey mind trivia can wait for breaks.