Procrastination is an ever present danger for me, especially since I've been doing research. One of the biggest traps I fall into is at the start of the day, or whenever I sit down at the computer after a break, I go first to my inputs. There are just so many fantastically interesting things happening in the world. I check my mail, read my feeds, see what's happened on identi.ca, drop in to #habari IRC. It feels busy. It feels like I'm being productive.

But I know I'm just fooling myself, and really all I'm doing is procrastinating. What I really should be doing is producing output. Working out the unanswered questions from my last experiment, writing the plan for my next experiment, and seeing how many of those questions I can try to answer and how many should be left until later, writing chapter three.

So I'm trying to train myself at the moment, in order to finish my dissertation and get my life back (and let Rachel get her life back, to an extent). I'm cutting back on my inputs. First thing, I dive into my outputs.

Output then, if I've had a good day of outputs, inputs.