“Over Easy” by Smoky Combs http://www.flickr.com/photos/unprose/219282585

On the Inspiring Power of Procrastination

Or, “How I Get So Much Done: Avoiding Doing Everything”

In 2 and a half days (really, 2 days, I’m being overly generous) I’m going to go to NodeConf. This conference will be held at the lovely Walker Creek Ranch, a literal summer camp where Mikeal Rogers has organized the renowned NodeConf Summer Camp un-conferences in the past. This will be a conference like no other. There are no “talks”, only actual hands-on classes. I’m teaching one of them.

This wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that:

1. I’ve never actually taught a class.
2. There’s like a million other things that are all urgent and have to get done right now, and
3. Mikeal will kill me if I don’t do this good.

This is a perfect storm for procrastination. It’s not particularly difficult, but there are a lot of little steps that I don’t actually understand very well, and plenty of easy outs where I can say, “Oh, but but but, I really do have to get this done, and it’ll only take a second.”

In the last few weeks, I have:

1. Started uploading the npm package tarballs to a service that will eventually serve as the backbone of a CDN and distributed code search, and sketched a plan of how that’s going to work long-term, proving the concept, and laying out all the bugs that have to be fixed.
2. Rewrote node-semver to comply with the SemVer 2.0 specification (and also helped finish the specification, so that it would be suitable to code against — Backus-Naur Form grammars were involved.)
3. Update npm to understand SemVer 2.0 valid version strings.
4. Root-caused some node-glob Windows formatting bugs.
5. Cleaned my house and did dishes with a regularity that I’m sure my partner wishes was the norm.
6. Shipped several Node releases.
7. Perfected my headstand, and made significant progress towards handstand.
8. Wrote a module to fix a Joyent production bug that isn’t even my bug, really, but I just knew how to fix it, and my coworker was being impacted by it.
9. Started using Medium, and wrote out the pros and cons of switching over whole-hog from Tumblr, vs only writing “essay” style stuff here and doing silly tumblr-type stuff there, vs automagically sending the data one direction or the other.
10. Wrote my first post for Medium, just to see if I like the format. (So far, seems nice.)
11. Wrote a bare-bones agenda of what to talk about in my NodeConf class.

The list goes on and on. There’s some wonderful private personal-life stuff on there that’s also taken up lots of time as well. There’ve been parties and dates and vacations and family gatherings.

What should I have been doing in this time? Probably writing up a few things to walk the NodeConfers through.

I need to figure out a way to have something else I need to do, so that I can procrastinate that by writing my presentation. I do this with talks, too, though not as often.

And as far as I’m concerned, it’s going to have to be done by Wednesday, since Thursday we’re heading up there, and Friday I start teaching it, so that’s the minimum required time to walk through it and get to know it. And Mikeal will kill me if it’s no good. So it has to be good.

I’m sure I’ll get to it. It might keep me up tonight.

But first, I’m starving. I can’t work on an empty stomach. Did I mention that every day I’ve been spending an hour perfecting the over-easy egg? It’s flawless now.