Beating Procrastination!

The other day, i read this article about “How to Beat Procrastination“. What interested me was that, the article outlined a procrastination equation,

procrastination equation Beating Procrastination!

This was followed by couple of steps on how to beat procrastination. It looked at factors in the equation that you can control – Expectancy, Value and Impulsiveness (Please read the article of more details). The article goes on to state that -

… Once you know the procrastination equation, our general strategy is obvious. Since there is usually little you can do about the delay of a task’s reward, we’ll focus on the three terms of the procrastination equation over which we have some control. To beat procrastination, we need to:

1. Increase your expectancy of success.

2. Increase the task’s value (make it more pleasant and rewarding).

3. Decrease your impulsiveness.

Then there was this article, that explained what the author had in place to beat procrastination. The article is aptly titled as “My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination“. It gives a step-by-step approach to be productive and beat procrastination.

Step 1: Notice I’m procrastinating.

Step 2: Guess which unattacked part of the equation is causing me the most trouble.

Step 3: Try several methods for attacking that specific problem.

Step 4: If I’m still procrastinating, return to step 2.

The trick here is to realize that Delay is the only fact that you don’t have control over.With that enlightenment, i decided to take myself through the steps when ever i find myself procrastinating.

Need less to say, it didn’t last very long. It simply failed at the very fist task. Or to give the benefit of the doubt to the equation, the task was not a well chosen one.

The Task :  To wake up in the morning.

Result : FAILED

I wake up everyday my snoozing the alarm as many times as i can. Just prolonging the sleep 10 more minutes and that goes on and on, till i’m really late for work.

The alarm went off as usual. 7:30 AM, the alarm read. The hand moved voluntarily to tap on the mobile and snooze the alarm. Now it was the long and tiresome process of getting my ass of the bed.

Then, in that state of semi-consciousness, i thought about the 4 steps. But all i could remember was step 1 and 2. I realized that i was at step 1 – i’m procrastinating.

Now to step 2 and answer the question – what would be the benefit of waking up early? I could be in office early, i could finish work more because of the less distractions. I could feel fresh all day. I would be … would be … would … wou .. zzz…

(It never works!)

and (finally) i’m proud of my wife!

This might as well could be the last blog post that i write before i step into a new roll. So here it goes…

With just over a day left for us to welcome the new member to our family, i must say that i’m totally proud of my wife and this is why.

She said -

We got married on 11th of Feb. Imagine the baby being born today (23rd of March) and we have our second child on 5th of August. Now the day of wedding was 11, first child would’ve been on 23 and the second on 5/8. With that we could’ve had the Fibonacci series – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8.. – in the family !

Needless to say, something like that coming from her made me overly proud of the woman i married.

FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

During the last year i expanded my plugin usage in Firefox. Some of them being really useful and some of them… well… was not even worth the time spent on installing them.

Here is my hot pick from 2009

Poster

This one is for those people who cant get their head around the classic cURL. The fact remains that there are still people who are into development/testing and doesn’t know about cURL and i’m not talking about newbies. So here is one tool that can save your day. Do any HTTP related work with this and i bet you will fall in love with this.

poster FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

Tamper Data

This lets you mess with the HTTP headers and parameters. But the best use of this i have found so far was that it can display the headers in a very neat way, that can be understood easily

 FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

Lazarus

This is a form recovery tool. I bet everyone of us has that frustrating moment after filling a form and submitting it, the data is all lost due to some insane wizardry behind the scene that we didn’t know about. Well not anymore. Lazarus helps to recover the form data that was entered and saves the frustration.

 FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

SQL Injection

Well do i need to describe what this is? In short this can run selected SQL Injection attacks on the fields on a webpage. Great tool identify similar vulnerabilities.

 FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

and last but one of my favorite -

Regular Expression Tester

Anyone who has worked on regex knows that, it would be great if they could see the regex in action on the test data, on the fly, as they are building it. This plugin is a dream come true.

 FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

Trust me you need this plugin.

For the layman, you dont need any of these plugins. But i assure you that the following is a must have for both geeks and non-geeks alike.

  1. Password Exporter
  2. ScrapBook
  3. Firefox Extension Backup Extension
  4. DeepestSender (for bloggers)

For the geeks and the web-developers here is my list –  FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

 FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009