Intrinsic Motivation, Prioritizing, and Procrastination

When does an altering of your priorities become procrastination? Let us use my present status as an example.

Today I received my funding and I fully intend on getting my textbooks and school supplies today to make my life more "organized." This morning, upon waking up, I knew that I should be studying my first few chapters of statistics. This however, was overrided by the urge to clean the disaster I have been calling my room. So, I reprioritized, and began cleaning my room. The thing is, in my heart of hearts, I know that I do not want to be doing statistics.

This leads us back to whether or not I am reprioritizing for my benefit, or whether it is a complex form of procrastination.

A professor in economics would tell me to calculate my "opportunity cost" or the cost of my next best alternative. The thing is, either way, the main cost is my time, and since my time either way is equal, it becomes irrelevant.

Perhaps the real question is, where does my intrinsic motivation factor it. Students of psychology will know that intrinsic motivation is motivation that is derrived from the person. As in, no reward is neccessary, as the action itself has its own internal reward. While I tend to be highly intrinsically motivated, I wonder if perhaps my procrastination is presently hindering what should be my intrinsic motivation to study.

Again, the more amusing part of this post, is that right now, I am neither cleaning my room OR studying. I am writing about my theories in my blog, which evidently is the ultimate form of procrastination. Maybe I should change the name of the site to "Presently Procrastinating" or "Postulated Outcomes of Procrastination" or something equally as intelligent.

Ahhh, back to cleaning the room, and theorizing over my motivations to do just that.


As a post-script, if you are bored, read through the writings of John Titor, and decide for yourself... interesting, to say the least.