Frazz by Jef Mallett for December 15, 2024

Procrastinating so hard it’s pre-emptive.

I had a manager who believed in mutable lists. Every night, you leave yourself a list in priority order of what’s not yet done. As you work through the day, you add to the list AT THE BOTTOM… or occasionally jump off the list and manage a crisis. Last thing in the day, you build a new prioritized list for tomorrow. Anything that’s been on the list more than a week simply gets put on the “someday” list… and thus forgotten.

I found it cumbersome for my work style, which is much more about having ONE item (plus inevitable interruptions) you’re working on. And a bucket of “when I’m done with this” items. Pretty often I’d build the pieces of the project and then merge them… but sometimes I’d build a project scaffold first and then hang functionality on it. The “software as a service” folks prefer that latter: You can ship on a moment’s notice… with some pieces “TBD”.

A novelist, Dickens I think, was in college and in debt. So he sat down and made a list of debts and assets, the former much longer that the later, and how to mange them. Took him most of a morning. He then reread the list, heard the noon bells, decided to think about it later, tore up the list, and went off to borrow a shilling for lunch and a beer.

Frazz would be wise not to become an item on Caulfield’s ‘to-do’ list. Could make for frustrating days.

That’s when you realize how comfortable you are doing all those silly little time-wasting things — it’s even worse now with cellphones and idle games.

Never put off ’til tomorrow what you can get out of doing entirely.

Caulfield learns of life.

First item on the list:

“Make a list of…”

He just needs to cross off the useless ones.

Top 10 Reasons to Procrastinate:

1.

My favorite list is a starboard list.