But only when on a deadline…

It’s hard to know how to react to psychological research saying procrastination is now an official mental illness affecting about 20 percent of the population. The cynic notes immediately this telling tidbit: psychologists warn these people need therapy.

Therapy, in case you didn’t know, is how psychologists stay in business. With all these psych majors pumping out of the liberal arts pipeline, there seems an obvious need to create more loonies—even if the loonies are generally functional, generally sane most of the time. There’s a lot of money in just slightly crazy. More drugs to dispense, more hours logged.

But that could be another sign of mental illness: denial. It could be humans have wires crossed in their brains all the time. Just add it to the list of human conditions. Human: man or woman existing in the throes of Kant’s constants of birth, death, and sexuality, but whose pandemic denial of evolutionary-societal conflicts makes them generally a little bit nuts.

Wouldn’t be hard to prove there are a lot of crazy humans, would it? It may be we only notice crazy when it’s really crazy, like-a-violent-monkey crazy or eat-your-liver-with-some-fava-beans-and-a-nice-chianti crazy. Maybe more subtle types of crazy we just tolerate and label as the character flaws that make a person human.

Maybe immediate manic skepticism or depressive acceptance of either theory is a bit too, well, bipolar. Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle. Maybe that’s a lie too. Doesn’t matter, the research shows what it shows: procrastination is a mental illness and the digital age isn’t helping things one bit.

I remember thinking ten years ago about how many kids I knew were on Ritalin and I wondered if too much stimulation—TV, radio, the Internet, cell phones, movies, music, games, well, you name it—wasn’t contributing to everybody having so much trouble paying attention. We know now that multitasking isn’t what it’s cracked up to be—it actually makes one slower—and I may not have been far from the mark according to the procrastination research.

So here’s what’s up: Chronic procrastination is more common than depression or phobias, and doesn’t affect any particular demographic. Rather, it affects people across racial, gender, and socio-economic lines:

“[I]t encourages depression, lowers self-esteem, causes insomnia, and indirectly affects health by discouraging visits to the dentist or doctor. Sufferers are also more likely to have accidents at home involving unmended appliances.”

They think procrastination is on the rise because of email, web-surfing, social networking, texting, YouTube, blogging, et cetera, et cetera.

But it’s not a new thing, not by a long shot. Time-wasters (”sufferers” of procrastination), they think, are hard-wired to be that way by evolution, by survival instinct. Back when we lived in caves, we only turned on the go-getter attitude when absolutely necessary, like when a saber-toothed tiger was staring us down, and hurrying the hell up suddenly mattered. So then, add this to list of human conditions as well: generally lazy until given a good reason to do something.

Take a good look at orangutans, how they lay about (you can see them on one of the Discovery channels), and then walk by a backyard with a hammock some time. Do you think there’s a difference?

It wasn’t really clear from the article about the study what was meant by “therapy.” When my grandmother was growing up, “therapy” entailed her parents taking switch to her backside. They didn’t know that causes other problems perhaps worse than laziness, which is why we (as a society) don’t do that anymore.

Today we use deadlines, and chronic procrastinators push the limits of those deadlines. Researchers say it’s not true when they tell themselves they work better under pressure; they just have selective memories and put those times they succeed in their mental pockets while conveniently forgetting the times they crashed and burned. One more human condition: We kid ourselves a lot.

How about a different, more radical proposal than trying to rewire a brain hardwired for energy conservation (i.e., chronic procrastinator)? How about we slow down and enjoy life from time to time? Maybe it’s the workaholic who’s crazy, instead?

Yeah, I know. Not gonna happen. I suppose brains are easier to rewire than entire achievement-driven societies.

Tags: Blogging, Business, Computers, Fun, Internet, News, Productivity, Ramblings, Technology by JasonLeeMiller - 2 Comments »

Not to rehash a really long article, but I took a fairly in-depth look at what could be in the future an important topic for both bloggers and commentators: Who owns blog comments?

The initial answer seems obvious, but like everything else in life, there are at least two sides to it and the “obvious” answer differs depending on who is giving it. My first thought was that a blog commenter gives up his rights to a comment once he hits the submit button. The comment, as though he had said it out loud and it was recorded is now just “out there,” and is sort of public domain.

Public domain is a bad choice of phrase when talking about a potential copyright issue. It seems to me closest to a quote or sound bite, and a publisher, just like a newspaper, magazine, radio or TV show, has the right to edit or delete as he sees fit.

But something happened recently when Robert Scoble raised the issue that he owned his comments. A law professor from Santa Clara University told me pretty much the same thing. Surprisingly, he said that if the blogger wanted to publish a best-of anthology of comments, he would probably need the commenter’s permission. That was a shocking bit of legal interpretation for me. But I suppose with print, radio, and TV, they make it very clear in writing that submitted reader/viewer input becomes their property and they can do what they want with it after that.

This is leading to the idea that bloggers should make the same type of policy clear to their own readers.

Tags: Blogging by JasonLeeMiller - 4 Comments »

People often ask me what I do and when I tell them, they say “oh, you’re a blogger.”

Ahem. Let me say that again. I write for a company that publishes several ebusiness publications, but mainly for just the flagship. But don’t confuse me with what is typically thought of as a blogger. I use the shift key and punctuation. Generally, I write with complete sentences unless I can justify it artistically. My grammar–on the first go ’round–is often impeccable, as is my spelling. I have standards, a background, degrees, certifications.

I am a writer, and I am stuck-up about it.

And sometimes I blog, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Yes, I did begin a sentence with a conjunction. Want to make something of it?

But I don’t consider myself, not full time anyway, a blogger. Anyone can blog; not everybody has something to say.

What’s the difference between being a writer and a blogger? That’s a tough question. Seems to me like nobody’s been able to define exactly what a blog is, much less a blogger. The blog got its name from web log, as everybody knows. It intimates a kind of journal or diary. Informal, random, unreserved, impassioned, and a bit of a glimpse into someone’s private mind.

For example, I like my toast lightly toasted, not dark. Don’t burn it. Burnt bacon is okay, though.

I generally feel like my parents were full of it when they told me to be a gentleman and put girls on a pedastel like I’m some genteel south’n trust fund baby and not the rogue I always had the potential to be. Chicks in college hated that stuff! My wife kind of likes it though. All that door-opening and seat-pulling got me pretty far in Japan, too, where chivalry’s never been alive enough to have been killed off by the feminist movement.

See, intimate.

A writer, a self-respecting one, a journalist or prose writer has a high horse and printing press. While you notice a blogger’s self, and even his writing skill, the better a writer is, the less you notice him in what is written and the more you notice the story–it’s a substance over style thing. The writer is copyrighted, sensitive about it, and gets paid if he’s lucky, and if really lucky sees work in print somewhere. But most of all he suffers for his art; he doesn’t slap words up on a screen. Yes, all that’s changing and yes it’s becoming harder and harder to tell the difference anymore.

When the government went after Larry Flint, the publisher of Hustler, a famous question was asked about how to tell the difference between art and pornography. The famous answer was: I know it when I see it.

Most bloggers don’t write this much in a post because the Internet has a short attention span. So if you’ve made it this far, let me reward you with the declaration of my own BS. Often the rules of anything are there to keep people down. When writing has rules, when we separte ourselves along arbitrary elitist lines, we not only become predictable as writers but we also ascribe to a system designed to stifle voices rather than set them free.

so blog on bloggers and do it however you wish so long as you contribute to the grander conversation.

I’ll still call myself a writer, though.

Tags: Blogging by JasonLeeMiller - 1 Comment »

Here are a couple written by me:

1

A blog maintained with integrity and consistency can open up doors that you might have never thought existed. These doors might never have appeared as something accessible, but a blog can be your key to open up and explore what’s beyond.

2

The best things in life come as a surprise. Do not fall for the quick money that blogging has been known to earn, instead focus on building a network and establishing yourself in a community, and get ready for the surprise.

[Read more →]

Tags: Blogging by Ritu B - No Comments »

As we venture out in the world of blogging, we tend to follow the footsteps of one’s that have already made it big in the blogosphere. We try and copy their strategy, their techniques and pretty much everything they do in order to succeed and become the next A list blogger. What we fail to realize is there is a lot to be learned from bloggers that are just starting out as well.

In this post I will point out some of the things that we might have forgotten as we try to climb the ladder of success when it comes to blogging. So what exactly can we learn from new bloggers? [Read more →]

Tags: Blogging by Ritu B - 2 Comments »

With all the blogs on the web, it has increasingly become a challenge to stand out from the crowd. As many blogs as it is out there, it seems like no matter what topic you write about, or what niche you choose, it is most probably already explored by someone else. So how exactly do you stand out from the crowd? What are some of the ways you can differentiate yourself and your blog from the blogosphere?

I am pretty sure you have heard of quite a few of them. I will list a couple here but in this post I will share the one most and critical way to differentiate yourself from other bloggers and blog. [Read more →]

Tags: Blogging by Ritu B - 2 Comments »