Ambivalence

I am a procrastinator by heart. I often start something, and whenever I feel that something is off or not fun enough, I will deviate from the subject, find something else that is easier, or just stop completely. Sometimes I plan to do something, but it is being postponed for months, even years, because I do not feel like doing it.

For this paper, I do like the topic in itself, but there are some issues that makes it a bit difficult to complete:

• The research is boring. I need to skim through several articles to locate those that I can actually use in my paper. In most cases this could take several hours up to several days. While some of them are interesting to read, the hard part is that I am not that proficient in the English vocabulary. To make things worse, I gaze towards the distance and loose focus on what I’m currently reading, meaning I need to re-read up to a whole page in some cases because I lost focus.

• Writing is fun, but it is really hard in the beginning. Whenever I have written about 1/4 of the paper, I get up in speed, and it does not stop to accelerate. Still, as I mentioned earlier, my proficiency in the English language is limited, so I need to constantly recheck what I wrote to avoid grammar mistakes. (You can clearly see it in this channel)

• While the paper does not mention my project, it is still there and I am eager to work on that instead. Programming is fun, but the actual coding should not take longer than a week over the course of 2 months I have to finish this paper. And as I mentioned earlier, if something is fun, I tend to deviate towards it.

So, what did I do last week? Well, I did in fact write a couple of more lines, look up some references, had a meeting with my tutor and wrote a bunch of comments of how I should structure the paper. What I also did? I spent too many hours on PixelMap. I hope that it will not happen again and that I did not loose that much time on it.