Good and Bad Procrastination

Procrastination is one of the common worst habits to pick up as a human being. Most of the time people tell themselves that they have to get their work done. For some reason there’s a little part of our brains that tell us to wait and do it another time. Until its way too late and there’s not enough time to finish your task. Paul Graham wrote a selection about good and bad procrastination, and how procrastination can help you get your work done. Throughout most of the passage Paul Graham uses logos to persuade the reader that procrastination is a bad thing, but it can also be useful for finishing more important work.

One example of logos used by Graham is when he writes, “Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work”. He then goes on to explain this idea that everyone throws off important work to run errands, so why not switch the cycle and throw off errands to get important work done. Graham then writes about how he uses his strategy and that it doesn’t always work. It’s better than bad procrastination which allows you to get no real work done and feel bad about it. I feel this could possibly work with others and really be effective with getting work done. Another example of logos used by Graham is when he writes about how this strategy works. He explains “If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself into doing it”. He goes into detail by writing about how procrastinating is going to happen regardless because you don’t want to do real work. If you tell yourself errands are real important and disregard them to do something that is actually important you could then be effective. It seems like a very good idea because if I could just finish my work without procrastination then I would do it. That’s not possible though because your mind plays games when you don’t want to do real work. If you tell yourself those errands are the real time consumers and is much more than real work it’s possible to finish real work.

Another example of logos used by Graham is when he writes “The reason it pays to put off those errands is that real work needs two things errands don’t: big chunks of time and the right mood”. Graham explains that errands waste time and it allows us to procrastinate the bad way. Real work is the major time consumer and more important, but it needs that inspirational drive to be finished.