Two Articles on Procrastination I Found Particularly Interesting...

The first is a general article by Paul Graham that is short and applies to many things in life (not just research). The second is by the great Richard Hamming and is longer and is more limited to research. I found both really interesting, though I admit I did not finish the Hamming article, but will soon.

My favorite part of the Graham article, "But the trouble with big problems can't be just that they promise no immediate reward and might cause you to waste a lot of time. If that were all, they'd be no worse than going to visit your in-laws. There's more to it than that. Big problems are terrifying. There's an almost physical pain in facing them. It's like having a vacuum cleaner hooked up to your imagination. All your initial ideas get sucked out immediately, and you don't have any more, and yet the vacuum cleaner is still sucking."

Thanks to Sean for pointing me to these articles.