Structured Procrastination (by John Perry)

Figure 1: Author practices jumping rope with seaweed while work awaits.

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

The most perfect situation for structured procrastination that I ever had was when my wife and I served as Resident Fellows in Soto House, a Stanford dormitory. In the evening, faced with papers to grade, lectures to prepare, committee work to be done, I would leave our cottage next to the dorm and go over to the lounge and play ping-pong with the residents, or talk over things with them in their rooms, or just sit there and read the paper. I got a reputation for being a terrific Resident Fellow, and one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a set up: play ping pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips.

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.

The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I'm sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.

Another example is book order forms. I write this in June. In October, I will teach a class on Epistemology. The book order forms are already overdue at the book store. It is easy to take this as an important task with a pressing deadline (for you non-procrastinators, I will observe that deadlines really start to press a week or two after they pass.) I get almost daily reminders from the department secretary, students sometimes ask me what we will be reading, and the unfilled order form sits right in the middle of my desk, right under the wrapping from the sandwich I ate last Wednesday. This task is near the top of my list; it bothers me, and motivates me to do other useful but superficially less important things. But in fact, the book store is plenty busy with forms already filed by non-procrastinators. I can get mine in mid-Summer and things will be fine. I just need to order popular well-known books from efficient publishers. I will accept some other, apparently more important, task sometime between now and, say, August 1st. Then my psyche will feel comfortable about filling out the order forms as a way of not doing this new task.

The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?

Good engineering lasts forever (by Hartmut Ritter)

Good Engineering lasts forever!

The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches.That is an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and the U.S. railroads were built by English expatriates.

Why did the English build them that way?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did "they" use that gauge? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

So why did the wagons have that particular odd spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that was the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads?

The ruts in the roads, which everyone had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels, were first formed by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. The U.S. standard railroad gauge of 4 feet-8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back end of two war horses.

Thus we have the answer to the original question. Now for the twist to the story.

When we see a space shuttle sitting on its launching pad, there are two booster rockets attached to the side of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRB's. The SRB's are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.

The engineers who designed the SRB's might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' rumps.

So, a major design feature of what is arguably the worlds most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass!

Don't you just love engineering?

Do you remember how to study? (from mit's website)

Final exams loom, and you must review eight fact-laden textbook chapters and a binder full of class notes. Since you've made it to advance student, you probably know how to learn. A part of your mind seems to monitor your brain, telling you if you need to review a formula again, or if you know it cold, or if you could at least recognize it on a multiple-choice test.

But exactly where is that part of the mind?

It's right there above your eyes, in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) of your brain. And it's quite a separate system from the medial temporal lobe (MTL), near your ear, that actually encodes facts in your memory.

That's what John Gabrieli, an associate member of the McGovern Institute at MIT, and his colleagues at Stanford University discovered in novel functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies peering into the brains of 18 young adults performing learning tasks.

"We've known through psychological studies that the brain performs these two functions, encoding the memory and predicting whether the information will be later recalled," said Gabrieli, lead author of a study in the December issue of Nature Neuroscience. "But without these brain imaging studies, we might have thought they occurred in the same brain region. This is our first insight into the different brain mechanisms for memory and prediction, what psychologists call judgments of learning."

The fMRI studies showed that one specific brain region, the MTL, becomes very active when actually encoding facts in memory, while a quite separate region, the VMPFC, lights up when people predict whether they will later remember what they've learned. These two physically and functionally distinct circuits communicate with each other through the lateral and dorsal prefrontal cortex (LDPFC) at the outer end of the cortex.

Predicting is an important part of successful learning because it allows us to judge whether we've studied enough or need to review more, explained Gabrieli, who is also the director of the Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute and the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Cognitive Sciences. People who make more accurate predictions are better learners and better students. Some people can intuitively judge their own memory; others must learn the skill. Gabrieli said he hopes that understanding more about the brain mechanisms involved in this type of introspection might help people become better learners.

Learning is just one example of how the "mind" can inspect its own content, he noted, and the VMPFC may be a key to the broader issue of self-awareness. Interestingly, the metal rod that pierced Phineas Gage's brain in 1848 obliterated the VMPFC, transforming a soft-spoken, dependable fellow into a loud-mouthed drifter with virtually no self-awareness.

Yun-Ching Kao and Emily Davis of Stanford contributed to this research. The study was conducted at Stanford with support from the National Institute of Mental Health/NIH.