Author: frizzyLogic

Posted on

Utility = E x V/ÃD

Update – anyone suffering the curse of procrastination should head over to Dr Piers Steel’s website Procrastination Central where there is an opportunity to take part in his research online, have a formal assessment of your procrastination and some suggestions about tackling it. On the other hand you might have something else to do first. /update

I’ve been attempting to write a post but, well, procrastinating over it.

A University of Calgary professor has recently published his magnum opus on the subject of procrastination – and it’s only taken him 10 years.

Joking aside, Dr. Piers Steel is probably the world’s foremost expert on the subject of putting off until tomorrow what should be done today. His comprehensive analysis of procrastination research presents some surprising conclusions on the subject, such as:

  • Most people’s New Year’s resolutions are doomed to failure
  • Most self-help books have it completely wrong when they say perfectionism is at the root of procrastination, and
  • Procrastination can be explained by a single mathematical equation

“Essentially, procrastinators have less confidence in themselves, less expectancy that they can actually complete a task,” Steel says. “Perfectionism is not the culprit. In fact, perfectionists actually procrastinate less, but they worry about it more.”

Other predictors of procrastination include: task aversiveness, impulsiveness, distractibility, and how much a person is motivated to achieve. Not all delays can be considered procrastination; the key is that a person must believe it would be better to start working on given tasks immediately, but still not start.

It’s estimated that about 15-20 per cent of the general population are procrastinators. And the costs of procrastinating can add up well beyond poor work performance, especially for those who delay filing their taxes or planning their retirement.

And that formula up there in the title? it’s Steel’s

Temporal Motivational Theory, which takes into account factors such as the expectancy a person has of succeeding with a given task (E), the value of completing the task (V), the desirability of the task (Utility), its immediacy or availability (Ã) and the person’s sensitivity to delay (D).

Doesn’t help me get the post done though.

Posted on

Diamonds

And some triangles.

diamonds

I spent much of the day rushing round with the firstborn sorting out stuff for his return to school tomorrow. I don’t remember having to have such huge amounts of clothes and bits and bobs when I was his age, but that’s probably more a product of advancing age and memory loss than objective reality.

Further evidence of the general mental disintegration is the fact that I mentioned experimenting with the camera’s ISO and white balance settings two posts in a row. I shan’t mention them this time. I shall mention, for the first and I hope only time, that I’m shooting RAW files and dipping the very end of my smallest toe into the wonder that is RAW conversion. It’s all very complicated.

Apart from the difficulties of a degenerating brain grappling with complexity the other drawback to RAW is that it takes more than 10 seconds for the camera to save the file. The shutter speed may be snippy-snappy but then the apparatus chunters away processing the information and during this time is unable to take another shot.

In the case of the above shot, however, this turned out to be an advantage because it was the time of the process rather than my timing decision which dictated the moment of the shutter firing and the result seems pleasing, to me at least. The crown-like crenelations are the edges of a particularly doleful multi-story car park which I’ve always previously considered quite outstandingly ugly.

Posted on

But is it art?

tate britain

This man was so, well, artfully arranged on this bench that I suspect it might have been a “performance” of some sort. Even if not I had no compunction in photographing him because he appeared to be deeply asleep (not unconscious or dead because one of the gallery attendants checked) and he’s not recognisable from this picture.

I was at the Tate Britain to see the Holbein exhibition with my lovely friend C. It was spectacular but, because it was the last day, hideously crowded. Perhaps the man on the bench had found it all too much and retreated to a larger, cooler, more comfortable space to lie down and recover.

I’m finding the discipline of forcing myself to take a picture every day very rewarding so far. It means investigating how to use far more features of the camera than I usually employ. Basic technical things like adjusting the white balance and ISO setting (“film” speed). I bought a book on digital photography yesterday and am working my way through it doggedly.

Circumstances on the domestic front are becoming clearer and easier too, albeit still requiring some technical expertise. A new love for him (which seems to be making him very happy) will, I hope, ease his transition from one space to another. I’m so glad that one of us has found tenderness, and I hope that I too will be able to move on soon with my life.

Posted on

Cat's paw

This isn’t just an excuse for cat blogging you know.

cat's paw

It’s also an unfortunate consequence of the weather. I’ve resolved to try to take and post to flickr a picture a day but at the moment the weather’s vile, it gets dark at four in the afternoon and about the only thing that stays still long enough for me to take a picture of it is the cat.

It does mean that I’m having to grapple with things like ISO speed and white balance though, so it’s all a good learning experience.

Posted on

Cat’s paw

This isn’t just an excuse for cat blogging you know.

cat's paw

It’s also an unfortunate consequence of the weather. I’ve resolved to try to take and post to flickr a picture a day but at the moment the weather’s vile, it gets dark at four in the afternoon and about the only thing that stays still long enough for me to take a picture of it is the cat.

It does mean that I’m having to grapple with things like ISO speed and white balance though, so it’s all a good learning experience.

Posted on

Baubles fire blanks shock!

[Festival of the Trees #7, the first of 2007, is now up at The Voltage Gate!]

unviable

Not only is it difficult enough to find a patch of urban ground that isn’t stony, I now discover that the poor old London Plane tree (Platanus x hispanica aka the bauble tree) is generally infertile. According to the first-born’s new tree book:

Female flowers mature to give the familiar, rough football-like plane fruits. The seeds are rarely viable, however, for London Plane is a hybrid between two trees, the Oriental Plane P. orientalis of Asia and south-east Europe, and the American Plane P. occidentalis. Where and when the hybrid appeared is a matter of controversy…

But the Plane entry at The-Tree.org.uk has a seductive theory:

Some sources say this hybrid between the Oriental Plane and the American Plane originated in Spain or France around 1650, but there is also a possibility that it originated in the Tradescant nursery garden in Lambeth, south London. John Tradescendant the younger (1608 -1662) was a gardener to Charles I and inherited the nursery his Father had established for the study of plants. Both P. occidentalis and P. orientalis are on record as having grown in this garden, so it is a real possibility that the London Plane did originate here. The first description of the tree in Great Britain, which we have in writing, is from the Oxford Botanical Gardens in 1670.

There are all sorts of other fascinating snippets – the fact that the peeling of the bark helps the tree survive heavily polluted environments because it prevents the pores becoming blocked; the bark boiled in vinegar is allegedly efficacious in cases of dysentery, chilblains, hernias and toothache etc etc.

Continue reading “Baubles fire blanks shock!”

Posted on

New Year's Day

The sky was a beautiful clear blue this morning, full of light.

blue sky

A benign beginning and much appreciated.

New Year's Day

However twisted the branch, the buds still push through the dried veins of dead leaves.

Much of the past year has been dark and difficult, so much so that the brighter bits (and there have been some) have often been obscured. But I think, I hope, there has been a process underway, a form of progress however painful.

Posted on

New Year’s Day

The sky was a beautiful clear blue this morning, full of light.

blue sky

A benign beginning and much appreciated.

New Year's Day

However twisted the branch, the buds still push through the dried veins of dead leaves.

Much of the past year has been dark and difficult, so much so that the brighter bits (and there have been some) have often been obscured. But I think, I hope, there has been a process underway, a form of progress however painful.

Posted on

Music laughter love fun happiness

So many wonderful people. I started a list in my head last night and it was long, long, long. Long. Even longer than long.

I am so lucky. I am so grateful.

Teju has given us man-music to see the year out. Here’s the distaff (with one small alteration – who would have thought a rose room to be female-free?) to keep it company.

1. Diana Krall: Come Dance With Me
2. Marina Laslo: My Funny Valentine
3. Edith Piaf: La Vie En Rose
4. Sarah Vaughan: Perdido

Posted on

Pentatag

My revered colleague Rebecca has tagged me on the “Five things people don’t know about me” thing.

I love her intro to her own five things…

There are many things people don’t know about me. There’s a reason I don’t write about those things on this blog: I’m not interested in putting my entire life on the web, actually.

So very wise. I, on the other hand, might have to make something(s) up.

1. I won a national handwriting competition. At the age of seven. For seven year olds, of course.
2. I once made love to a spy in his office in his country’s embassy beneath the presidential portrait, was locked in overnight so his servants wouldn’t tell his absent wife of his infidelity on her return from a trip abroad and spent several interesting hours going through the contents of his desk by torch-light.
3. I can juggle.
4. The firstborn was produced in a toilet (the room, not the plumbing) to which I had retreated because the midwives didn’t believe I was in labour. The doctors said he had a fractured skull as a result of an abrupt landing on hard tiles and took him away and put him in the neonatal icu. The hospital falsified the account of the incident on the official record. It took several years to have the details amended and this probably only happened at all because my friend and witness happened to be a journalist at an influential television company and the consultant responsible retired.
5. I have not read a single book in the last two years.

I should now tag five more people shouldn’t I. I’ll tag Andrew because he tagged me once; Feng37 because of his line “I don’t want funny stories from my past to come and bite me on the ass for pretending like I’ve never done anything antisocial or perverted“; Hg because he probably has some funny stories from his past he’s yearning for an excuse to air; Krista because they’re bound to be fascinating and Lucy because she’s new to this blogging lark and has to be blooded in memes.