- A study conducted in 1999 by Read, Loewenstein and Kalyanaraman had people pick three movies out of a selection of 24. Some were lowbrow like “Sleepless in Seattle” or “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Some were highbrow like “Schindler’s List” or “The Piano.” In other words, it was a choice between movies which promised to be fun and forgettable or would be memorable but require more effort to absorb. After picking, the subjects had to watch one movie right away. They then had to watch another in two days and a third two days after that. Most people picked Schindler’s List as one of their three. They knew it was a great movie because all their friends said it was. All the reviews were glowing, and it earned dozens of the highest awards. Most didn’t, however, choose to watch it on the first day. Instead, people tended to pick lowbrow movies on the first day. Only 44 percent went for the heavier stuff first. The majority tended to pick comedies like “The Mask” or action flicks like “Speed” when they knew they had to watch it forthwith.
I do this occasionally, but not due to procrastination. I'm very much a film buff and put a ton of effort into film watching, but the same goes for articles and writing like humanodon noted below. It's more a matter of frame of mind. In this specific scenario, I'd watch the low-brow stuff first as well, so I can have the lasting impression left for the end. I'm not muddying the experience by watching those after watching something good. I'm also more able to because I have less to do afterward, i.e., I can devote myself fully to the good film since I've gotten other things out of the way. This is the same for reading and writing as well: get the easy, small, simple things out of the way first, devote yourself to something else, prepare your mind for it. Lately I've been planning to watch Marketa Lazarova as I've finally gotten the Criterion blu-ray release, but this week I've been high energy on one day, had lots of homework to do on others, and was sick the last two days. None of these conditions are conducive to my viewing the film properly.
Hmm. This certainly hits home. My browser window has about 15 tabs open right now, most of which are articles that are a bit heavy. Not long ago flagamuffin and I were bitching about how long our reading lists are and this article frames my situation nicely. That said, I do think that I've gotten better about procrastination than when I was in college. One of the things I've noticed is that the more I think about doing something, the less likely it is I am to do it. The solution that seems to work best, falls in line with what this article is saying. Setting deadlines for things helps, but what I find really helps me, is setting a deadline and then not thinking about it anymore and just doing it. I've been procrastinating a bit lately on writing, but a few weeks ago I set up a typewriter across from my desk, so that when I'm writing on it I'm facing away from the computer. Also, this means that when I'm writing and searching for a word, it's a bit less convenient to search for it, so I can either think of another way to say what I mean, or take the time to try to remember the word I'm groping for. The only thing now is, I have piles and piles of drafts which need to be scanned into my computer. I should set a deadline for that.
I have 605 tabs open right now, so you might say that I have a long reading list... but that's mostly because I don't use bookmarks at all and prefer to leave tabs open in the off-chance that I feel like going back to it. Not surprisingly, my browser crashes a lot.
Actually no, just sometimes (once a week), my browser will disappear, and I'll get the Firefox error message. It crashes a lot less than Chromium did for me (which crashed daily), where I normally had just eighty tabs open, but that was the limit because the tabs shrunk. I have a plugin called "vertical tabs" that allows me to stack the tabs infinitely, which may or may not be a good thing, considering that I have 600 of them open.