Péripéties d'un ours en Asie Hi, for people who don t speak french: have a look on my pictures just below. =)

..............................English version..........................

I have a lot of time to spend on my computer in this period, because the weather is really bad and cold in Guangzhou. So, I have a lot of time to think about my life....

I saw a video on internet which talked about the "procrastination" (the link: http://www.koreus.com/video/procrastination.html). It was the first time I heard that word. I checked that on internet and the meaning is something like that: You have something big to do, but it s really BIG and you prefer to make so many things rather than to do this one. In this way, you can:

-Take a tea

-check your mails

-clean your office or your house

-others things like that....

But, surely not to do what you had to do. And usually, you feel some culpability to escape your task.

And I realised that I did this in two things in my  life:

The first one is go game (chinese game) wich I play since two years. I played regularly for more than one year and after that, I played only sometimes or to teach this wonderful game to many people. And each time I wanted to play, but something inside me made me feeling bad about that.

And now, I know why: procrastination! Go game is a really difficult game and in a life, you can t go at the end of the game, you can t become the master of the game, just you will be better, not the best, just better...and to become that, in my level, you need to work, not enjoy, work; learn some shapes of professionnal players, study games of these players, play with stronger players for loosing, for learning about your loss.... All these things are not really fun, and the way to reach the goal (if you can reach the goal...) is so far away....too far away in fact...for me....so I dismissed and didn t really play anymore, but I promise you that I have the need to play this game all the time...  O_o

The second one is: the meditation.

For my new english readers, I participated to a meditation course in Hong Kong. I stayed 10 days in this course, without speaking, reading, smoking; just meditating for 10 days, 10 hours per day.

It was really interesting, but, at the end of the course, they explained you the whole technic and I was really desperate to understand that I just "softly touched" the whole technic and that, after more than 90hours of meditations. It will need so many hours of hard work to get a good result. Too much hours for me....so, even if I was really convinced by the goodness of this technic, I wasn t able to meditate every day (like I had to do to keep what I learned). I just dismissed in front of the hardness of the task....

Then, now, I know these behaviors were proscrination. I know that I dismissed in front of the hardness of the task, even if I wanted to spend some time in that. And I changed my mind about that...I started to play go and to do my meditations...I know just I will do that in my rythme, slowly, when I want and even if my progress will be slow, it s ok...it will be slow and what???

And now, you re asking yourself why I tell you that...??? Just because everybody do that and I believe that YOU are doing that, now...so, have a look to this good article I fished on internet, it could be interesting. (at the end of this page, after french version...  ;)

............................Version francaise...........................

En ce moment, j ai vraiment tout le temps du monde à passer devant mon pc parce que la temps à Canton est vraiment pourri: froid et pluvieux. L humidité se glisse dans vos vetements et malgré les 6/8 degrés, ca vous glace jusqu aux os.

Du coup, comme je passe vraiment plein de temps sur internet, et plein de temps a reflechir sur ma vie (comme souvent faut dire...), je me suis rendu compte d un trucs facheux: je fais de la procrastination! Je vous donne un lien d une petite video qui vous explique tres bien ce que c est: http://www.koreus.com/video/procrastination.html

Pour la petite histoire la procrastination, c est avoir un tres gros trucs a faire, mais c est tellement gros que du coup on a peur de commencer, alors on fait plein d autres trucs importants ou non pour reporter le moment ou on va s atteler à la grosse tache.

Pour vous donner un exemple de procrastination, vous pouvez, pour reculer le moment crucial:

-preparer un thé

-faire le ménage chez vous ou au bureau

-verifier vos mails

-et toutes choses qui vont vous faire reculer ce moment.

Et la chose vraiment désagréable de la procrastination, c est que vous culpabilisez de ne pas faire ce que vous avez a faire....:llmmmmmmmà

Et je me suis rendu compte que je faisais ca pour deux choses: le jeu de go et la méditation.

Pour le jeu de go, c est plutot simple a comprendre. J ai joué tres serieusement pendant un peu plus de un an et tout a coup j ai laché l affaire. Juste un peu d enseignement des bases pour de nouveaux joueurs ou ptet juste une ptite partie ou deux histoire de pas perdre la main...mais plus vraiment "jouer"....

Le go en fait c est infini... vous jouez, vous progressez, c est bien, mais au bout d un moment, l intuition ne suffit plus a vous faire progresser. A un moment, il vous faut travailler: apprendre des formes de pierres par coeur, etudier des parties de maitre, jouer contre de tres forts joueur et perdre, apprendre des parties que vous avez perdu....bref, ce qui etait plaisir devient travail...et un travail qui n a pas de fin puisqu au go vous n etes jamais bon; au go vous pouvez jouer toute votre vie, vous n en verrez jamais le bout....

Et voila pourquoi j ai abandonné, j ai abandonné devant l ampleur de la tache...

Pour la méditation, c est un peu pareil. Apres avoir passé 10 jours a travailler ardemment, ils nous ont devoilé la technique finale et je me suis rendu compte de l ampleur de la tache...je n avais en 90 heures de méditation, qu effleuré la technique et je me suis rendu compte aussi que ce n était pas en 2 petites heures par jour que j allais arriver a faire des progres. Peut etre tout juste conserver mes acquis, mais progresser....pour ca il me faudrait travailler 4 heures par jour au minimum pour conserver mes acquis et progresser un tout petit peu ....vraiment infini comme job....trop infini pour moi qui aime aller au bout des choses.....

Et voila....et je réalise enfin qu il y a un mot a mettre la dessus: procrastination....

La peur de pas pouvoir aller au bout, la peur d une tache trop enorme pour envisager de s y consacrer, la culpabilité de ne pas jouer ou de ne pas méditer alors que je voudrais.....Evident tout ca apres coup....

Et c est utile d en prendre conscience, tres utile meme parce que je me suis remis au go, l esprit plus leger, je me suis remis à la méditation, mais pas a fond cette fois ci comme d habitude, je prends mon temps, j essaye d y consacrer un peu de temps tous les jours et seulement quand j en ai l envie, pour ne pas voir ca comme une tache astreignante.....Un gros progrés à mon idée....

Et la vous vous demandez pourquoi je vous parle de ca...??? Ben parce que je suis sur que c est ce que vous faites dans votre vie de tous les jours, un peu comme moi, et je me suis dit que si ca m a servi à moi d en prendre conscience, ben ca vous servira sans doute aussi.  =)

Le texte en anglais ci dessous parle de la procrastination de maniere tres interessante. Pour les anglophones, je vous laisse le découvrir et pour les autres, je vous invite a taper "procrastination" sur google et à regarder aussi bien la définition de la chose que les moyens de s en débarasser....(attention c est le meme mot en anglais et en francais, n oubliez pas de cocher "site francophones seulement"  Bye!

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December 2005

The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad?

Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.

There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.

That's the "absent-minded professor," who forgets to shave, or eat, or even perhaps look where he's going while he's thinking about some interesting question. His mind is absent from the everyday world because it's hard at work in another.

That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They're type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.

What's "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary. It's hard to say at the time what will turn out to be your best work (will it be your magnum opus on Sumerian temple architecture, or the detective thriller you wrote under a pseudonym?), but there's a whole class of tasks you can safely rule out: shaving, doing your laundry, cleaning the house, writing thank-you notes—anything that might be called an errand.

Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.

Good in a sense, at least. The people who want you to do the errands won't think it's good. But you probably have to annoy them if you want to get anything done. The mildest seeming people, if they want to do real work, all have a certain degree of ruthlessness when it comes to avoiding errands.

Some errands, like replying to letters, go away if you ignore them (perhaps taking friends with them). Others, like mowing the lawn, or filing tax returns, only get worse if you put them off. In principle it shouldn't work to put off the second kind of errand. You're going to have to do whatever it is eventually. Why not (as past-due notices are always saying) do it now?

The reason it pays to put off even those errands is that real work needs two things errands don't: big chunks of time, and the right mood. If you get inspired by some project, it can be a net win to blow off everything you were supposed to do for the next few days to work on it. Yes, those errands may cost you more time when you finally get around to them. But if you get a lot done during those few days, you will be net more productive.

In fact, it may not be a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. There may be types of work that can only be done in long, uninterrupted stretches, when inspiration hits, rather than dutifully in scheduled little slices. Empirically it seems to be so. When I think of the people I know who've done great things, I don't imagine them dutifully crossing items off to-do lists. I imagine them sneaking off to work on some new idea.

Conversely, forcing someone to perform errands synchronously is bound to limit their productivity. The cost of an interruption is not just the time it takes, but that it breaks the time on either side in half. You probably only have to interrupt someone a couple times a day before they're unable to work on hard problems at all.

I've wondered a lot about why startups are most productive at the very beginning, when they're just a couple guys in an apartment. The main reason may be that there's no one to interrupt them yet. In theory it's good when the founders finally get enough money to hire people to do some of the work for them. But it may be better to be overworked than interrupted. Once you dilute a startup with ordinary office workers—with type-B procrastinators—the whole company starts to resonate at their frequency. They're interrupt-driven, and soon you are too.

Errands are so effective at killing great projects that a lot of people use them for that purpose. Someone who has decided to write a novel, for example, will suddenly find that the house needs cleaning. People who fail to write novels don't do it by sitting in front of a blank page for days without writing anything. They do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need for their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email. "I don't have time to work," they say. And they don't; they've made sure of that.

(There's also a variant where one has no place to work. The cure is to visit the places where famous people worked, and see how unsuitable they were.)

I've used both these excuses at one time or another. I've learned a lot of tricks for making myself work over the last 20 years, but even now I don't win consistently. Some days I get real work done. Other days are eaten up by errands. And I know it's usually my fault: I let errands eat up the day, to avoid facing some hard problem.

The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination, because it doesn't feel like procrastination. You're "getting things done." Just the wrong things.

Any advice about procrastination that concentrates on crossing things off your to-do list is not only incomplete, but positively misleading, if it doesn't consider the possibility that the to-do list is itself a form of type-B procrastination. In fact, possibility is too weak a word. Nearly everyone's is. Unless you're working on the biggest things you could be working on, you're type-B procrastinating, no matter how much you're getting done.

In his famous essay You and Your Research (which I recommend to anyone ambitious, no matter what they're working on), Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself three questions:

1. What are the most important problems in your field?
2. Are you working on one of them?
3. Why not?

Hamming was at Bell Labs when he started asking such questions. In principle anyone there ought to have been able to work on the most important problems in their field. Perhaps not everyone can make an equally dramatic mark on the world; I don't know; but whatever your capacities, there are projects that stretch them. So Hamming's exercise can be generalized to:

What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?

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