Novel Avoidance

I’m never sure what to do about productive procrastination. I think this is a real thing, but I use the term to refer to times I am doing real work, just not the work I should be doing. It is a close cousin to knolling, and in like manner, productive procrastination is more a balm to the mind than anything else.

Where am I going with this? Turns out, it is hard to cover a book deliberately and comprehensively. I have a chapter one draft full of good quotes and a decent general form, and I cannot for the life me make it interesting to read. I pictured Book Club turning out something like the series I once did on Fooled by Randomness, but now that I think about it, I never did finish that series.

It’s worse than I thought.

The productivity part of my procrastination took the form of reorganizing the navigation of my site. Then I spun up a new DigitalOcean Droplet so I could have a place for Book Club discussions. This latter task involved a surprising amount of DNS, SMTP, and ssh work, so for a long while, I completely forgot I was utterly failing to accomplish my original goal. *sigh*

I am not giving up on The Practicing Stoic, or on Book Club in general, but I am now aware this will be hard. Why did this surprise me? It’s right there in the project name!

Anyway, come join the Book Club discussion, if you’d like. Or check out my site’s new Book Club navigation. I will eventually—and publicly—figure out how to discuss a book. In the meantime, I’ll certainly procrastinate in many novel, and maybe productive ways. After all, my RSS methodology surely deserves some attention…