Non-strategic Procrastination

My friend, a college professor, sent me a case study exercise that a student asked him about. He sent it about a month ago, and I’m usually pretty quick on responding. But this one drifted down in the inbox because of a closing, more work, and my expectation that I would need or want to focus on it a bit instead of just spitting out a few paragraphs in response.

I sent it back to him today with a pretty decent explanation – maybe 6 paragraphs.

Can you tell I’m procrastinating a bit? I’d been muddled the past few weeks, stuck between deciding to turn my side project efforts to writing the second draft of the startup book or getting the prototype of the startup back underway. The other day, the answer came to me: startup. (I think it has to do with the idea that the more progress I make there, the more I give the team stuff to work with. They’re not entirely waiting on me, but they will certainly do more as I complete more.)

I have figured out why, even though the coding is something I enjoy and what I want to do more of, I procrastinate. It’s because I’m back at the learning phase and trying to figure out stuff, which is a tiny bit disheartening both because it’s sort of like the failure phase (lots of failing as I figure stuff out) and because I’m not able to directly work on the actual problem. But that’s okay – figuring that out and writing it down here helps. And the last bit of hitting publish on this post is a good transition step to pulling up the next instructional videos on Rails that I’m working through to get going again.