Valence Procrastination

In his 2012 book The Art of Procrastination, John Perry suggests that there is a lot of value in what we do when we are putting off important projects.  In between getting to the project and now, a lot of the work that really  matters gets done.

More rigidly, this amounts to something like:  in order to get important things done, we invent a project to contain the space around them. 

If you had an indefinite amount of time to putter around your computer and your coffee, there would be no structure to it, and, like empty space without a house, it would feel too vast and open to nestle down in.  So you put a parameter around your time.  You say, “by the end of the day, I must have accomplished half of A.” Now you have a boundary, a temporal home. 

You can function inside a home. You know how to do that.  Your space is between Now and “the end of the day,” and so you start to fill it. You check email, write that thank-you note, finally look up the address of the friend you had to buy a gift for after she moved away and now need to send it.   You get busy on a whole slew of to-dos.  John Perry is right.  They are all important.  Sometimes more important.  Often, they are the food you need to do a fine job on the Project that’s waiting at time X.

Most often, however, Project X is just an excuse.  It may be large and important and it may even be something you need to do, but it exists most directly as a temporal parameter within which your other tasks feel comfortable being filled.
This is called my theory of Valence Procrastination.  “Valence” for the outermost shell of an electron orbiting cloud.

Electrons fill the space around their atoms for the most part from innermost space to outermost, from close to the nucleus to farther out.  In the slightly larger atoms, however, electrons begin to “leave room,” as they fill the shells. They will fill the outermost sphere of an energy level first and then fill in below. 

In chemistry, this is taught an optimization of stability.  In order to fill the bucket proper, you first need to define the bucket.

Perhaps something similar happens with human perception of time. In being most fndamentally a measure of change, time – space-time – is most certainly not linear. In treating it as linear, we follow lines that curve under our feet, like the paths of light rays that travel “straight” until their embedded space track bends with them.

Maybe spacetime, in being one single property and holding all non-entropic impurities like atoms and people, has only a few rules:  same for valence shells and to-do lists, and we people have just been too busy or barbarous or hungry to notice.