Like most people, but probably to a greater degree than most, I am a serial procrastinator.  We all must find a way to gain the willpower to do our work first, and what we want to do later.  I am not that strong of a believer in self-improvement material when it comes to procrastination, because I think avoiding procrastination involves willpower more than it does strategies.  One constantly consciously puts off doing something whenever possible, and to stop doing that only requires willpower.

Unfortunately, tonight, I was writing a paper, and when I had finally got working for an extended period of time, and when I switched to my browser to look something up, I involuntarily was sucked into Facebook because I had the tab open.  This also happens a lot with Wikipedia; you can read chains of linked articles and end up reading about something entirely irrelevant.

To remedy this, I envision an application, possibly a browser addon, that, when you have a word processor open (and it could do some checks to see whether the document you are editing is likely a paper, such as by seeing whether you have a standard MLA header, for example), compares the text of your document to the text of the tab(s) you currently have open, and closes it/them if there is insufficient relevancy to indicate that what you are browsing is related to your paper.  I believe this is necessary because one can unconsciously procrastinate when web-browsing, so a strategy or tool such as this is a useful counteraction.

This post was a method of procrastination.

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