03/07/2006 Archived Entry: "working hard"

Hard work pays off later, procrastination pays off now. True? To a certain extent. In the long run, hard work will provide a comfortable, maybe even early, retirement full of all the thing we enjoy enjoying. Procrastination lets us enjoy things NOW but at the price of knowing that hard work is coming up, and that’s where procrastination doesn’t pay off at all.

Whenever I’m goofing off instead of doing some work that I know I should be doing (which is, like, all the time), I can never truly enjoy myself. There’s always a voice, perhaps Christine’s, telling me I have better things to do, guilting me every instant, and reducing the amount of fun I could be having. Then once the half-hearted fun is over with and deadlines loom and work must absolutely, positively get done, it only gets half-assed done. Either time runs out, or time gets used up with lots of self-recriminating “shit, I should have started this hours ago”.

On the other end of the spectrum we have all the go-getters who do their work first. This is me at the start of a school term or of a new job. The shit gets done and the fun is FUN. It’s a tough mentality to stick to, when work starts to really pile on and get tough, my natural instinct is, counter-intuitively, just to slack. A mish-mash of catch-phrases for this side of the fence would go something like “work hard, play hard. In that order. And if you’re working, don’t play.”

There must surely exist some form of fun-equation for all of this. For example, the guilt-ridden procrastinators probably only experience about 65% of the fun they would be having without the upcoming work bogging them down but they get an extra X amount of satisfaction from having fun NOW (a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow) and spend more time having fun than working. The hard worker on the other hand enjoys 100% of his fun time and likely has a multiplier due to the increased satisfaction of having a good day’s work behind them. So without exact numbers, I’d wager the hard worker has more fun than the procrastinator.

Anyways, there's a lot more on this topic that I want to talk about, but I have to get back to work.

Replies: 8 comments

WHAT?????????? Why my voice????? Damn you making me sound like the killer of fun!! What did I ever do to you??? BLAH!!!

Posted by Ting @ 03/07/2006 10:10 PM EST

Writing this was just procrastinating, right?

It's so sad, because it is all so true and I'm just like you with that.
And changing oneself is so hard.

Bleurk.....

Posted by Zel @ 03/08/2006 09:45 AM EST

at least it's a productive form of procrastination, that's what i like to tell myself.

Posted by Rayne @ 03/08/2006 12:31 PM EST

I think, though, that the hard working ppl always end up working a lot more hours in the end. For instance, in college, those who read their textbook during the term will have to re-read the week before the exam anyway, while we procrastinators will read it only once, at top speed, the night before the exam. Very often, we get better grades too..

Posted by Étienne @ 03/09/2006 06:59 PM EST

Also, we all know some hardworking people who lost their spouse, quality of health or even their life just before getting their well-earned retirement...

Posted by Étienne @ 03/09/2006 06:59 PM EST

Etienne, there's a lot of confounding happening with your comparison of hard workers who read their textbooks. Hard work in studying != hard work that Thai's talking about. The reason that procrastinators for studying do better than people who read all the time is because those constant readers *know* they need to work harder to get the same marks.

What Thai's advocating, and I agree with him, is that, all other things being equal, doing work ahead of time leads to more fun after. I know that every time I finished an assignment several days ahead of time, not only did I have that wonderful sense of accomplishment, but my subsequent relaxing time was totally guilt-free and therefore *very* recharging.

There is a big difference between doing lots of work and doing the work before playing.

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