Friday, December 19, 2003
Procrastination is the Thief of Time...
So I was told very early in life, by my Science teacher way back when I was in Third standard. At that time, I was highly perplexed by what procrastination meant. She carefully explained the meaning to the class, and I was proud that a rather long word was added to my then (and now) limited vocabulary. Beyond this, I never bothered much about what the saying was saying, so to speak. As it turns out, I still am not bothered with the message even when I know the full meaning....
Why am I talking about such a mundane and commonplace thing as procrastination? The Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, my online look-up guide, gives the meaning as "to put off intentionally the doing of something which has to be done." This is precisely what I am doing now, in everything in life.
Much has been said about the hustle and bustle in IIT-M as regards the annual, ritual application process to the United States of America, by Suds. This process involves, among other things, getting recommendation letters from faculty, writing creatively-misleading SOPs & then the actual couriering (is there such a verb?) of the documents required to complete the application. Now, I know I have stated a wish to put up a self-reco here; I shall get back to that later. I have successfully obtained, after a lot of dilly-dallying, all the documents required from academic sources including the transcripts, reco-letters..even finished my SOP! But, now that I have all the components ready, I am halting at the assembly stage! Excuse the wording, but being a mechanical engineer doesn't help much!
I have been sitting on the "packets" as we call them for far too long. I just have to take the prints-out of some cover letters & I am just ready for sending my applications on their way. But, as usual, I am holding back until the absolute last moment! If I don't post the materials by tomorrow, I might just miss one or two of my deadlines. This tardiness was too much for my Dad to bear, and he launched into a longish discourse on the virtues of discipline, doing one's jobs on time, etc., etc....And it all boiled down to my sleeping at seemingly "odd" hours!! This, it seems is the root of all my problems! Now, can anyone tell me how to make this connection?
About the self-reco and the short story I promised (if anyone remembers, that is!), I was just too lazy to do much about them...
Inspite of all this, I still don't get what my teacher meant when she told a bunch of third class students about procrastination way back in 1990! Another thing I've done is put up a new Commenting server...so use HaloScan for the comments. Enetation sucks!
Why am I talking about such a mundane and commonplace thing as procrastination? The Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, my online look-up guide, gives the meaning as "to put off intentionally the doing of something which has to be done." This is precisely what I am doing now, in everything in life.
Much has been said about the hustle and bustle in IIT-M as regards the annual, ritual application process to the United States of America, by Suds. This process involves, among other things, getting recommendation letters from faculty, writing creatively-misleading SOPs & then the actual couriering (is there such a verb?) of the documents required to complete the application. Now, I know I have stated a wish to put up a self-reco here; I shall get back to that later. I have successfully obtained, after a lot of dilly-dallying, all the documents required from academic sources including the transcripts, reco-letters..even finished my SOP! But, now that I have all the components ready, I am halting at the assembly stage! Excuse the wording, but being a mechanical engineer doesn't help much!
I have been sitting on the "packets" as we call them for far too long. I just have to take the prints-out of some cover letters & I am just ready for sending my applications on their way. But, as usual, I am holding back until the absolute last moment! If I don't post the materials by tomorrow, I might just miss one or two of my deadlines. This tardiness was too much for my Dad to bear, and he launched into a longish discourse on the virtues of discipline, doing one's jobs on time, etc., etc....And it all boiled down to my sleeping at seemingly "odd" hours!! This, it seems is the root of all my problems! Now, can anyone tell me how to make this connection?
About the self-reco and the short story I promised (if anyone remembers, that is!), I was just too lazy to do much about them...
Inspite of all this, I still don't get what my teacher meant when she told a bunch of third class students about procrastination way back in 1990! Another thing I've done is put up a new Commenting server...so use HaloScan for the comments. Enetation sucks!
