Insights into Grad School: Productive Procrastination

Productive procrastination is the act of doing something that is ostensibly productive in the hopes of fooling oneself (and/or others) that one is actually doing something productive instead of just procrastinating from another activity.

Productive procrastination is extremely common in the grad student community (particularly PhD students), though I don't know if it is unique to grad students. Some great examples of this activity (I am guilty of all of these):

• Browsing Lifehacker to get "tips and tricks [in order to get] things done" more efficiently
• Carefully choosing fonts and slide designs instead of creating the actual slide presentation
• Checking email, one's RSS feeds, the weather, and then the news obsessively

I think productive procrastination is common among grad students because, in my estimation, PhD programs seem to attract a certain type of person: someone who is probably somewhat competitive, and someone who doesn't like to fail. Since these people are competitive, they never want to seem to stop working -- lest others get ahead. PhD students get into a state where they're paralyzed by uncertainty, and don't (or can't) really do any productive work on their real thesis stuff -- the theory being that "if you didn't do anything, you didn't really fail."

The confluence of this circumstance with the competitive personality flaw (feature) results in extreme attention to seemingly meaningful things (but are ultimately utterly useless when it comes to trying to finish one's thesis): the grad student doesn't have to feel bad about doing nothing (and therefore "really" wasting time), but ultimately, s/he's really doing what s/he is just to not to do real thesis work (and therefore is procrastinating).

As an exercise to the reader, determine whether my writing this blog entry is an example of productive procrastination.

Hint: I have to give a presentation soon that's only half written.