New Theme

There always seems to come a time when I get sick of my old design and create a new one. So, without further adieu, here it is, huge background image and all. Enjoy.

Procrastination

Procrastination is commonplace to many people, especially teenagers.. and me. The act of putting things off until a later date can often be a bad thing — it makes work sloppy, increases stress, and generally just makes you a miserable person.

Not too long ago, I tried to combat this by taking a week off from technology. Apparently, this alone isn’t a very good way to hinder procrastination; I’ve found myself spending more time than ever sitting in front of my computer after trying this. Believe me: starving myself of technology had worked for a short while, but now it’s creeping slowly back and, once again, is beginning to taking over my life.¹

I could just try shoving everything else to the side again, but this time, I’m trying something new. I’m going to do it little-by-little. These are the steps I’m going to take to hopefully conquer my procrastination once and for all, and hopefully some may work for you.

• Do homework the day before it’s due. With the way my high school’s schedule is set up, this is really easy. Every day, I only have four classes, which lessens the homework load every night and gives me more time to do it. With that, I’ll be able to do my homework at whatever time I want, and not worry about not finishing it, so it’ll be possible to take my time on it.
• Turn off my computer. With Mac OS X, it’s incredibly easy to set a time limit to use my computer by turning on parental controls for my account. It’s not necessarily a fun thing to do, especially if there are a lot of things I want to get done, but some form of self-discipline needs to be taken into consideration, since I wouldn’t consciously decide to take a step away from it.
• Stop writing blog posts when I have homework I could be doing. *cough cough*

Have any suggestions for additional steps?

¹This could just be a result of the week-long vacation, seeing as it’s Saturday. However, it’s helpful to take some precautions, right?

The Evolution of Blogging

Nowadays, blogging is becoming something more than what it was in the past. With the advent of micro-blogging and tumblogging, Weblogs are becoming ever-more personal and community-like.

I’d be hard-pressed to find a popular blog that hasn’t at one time or another responded to another blog or reposted information or maybe some form of media from another source (ie. YouTube videos, Flickr photos). Not only do bloggers do this as a way to keep their blogs fresh, but they do for the benefit or entertainment of their readers and, in many cases, the original poster of said content.

Now, blogs don’t have to be just original, lengthy posts that are just occasionally written by someone.

This brings me to another point, though. Because of how blogging is evolving, what will it become? A scrapbook of findings on the Internet? Quick little blurbs someone posted from their cell phone at work? Will the overall quality of today’s Weblogs take a turn for the worse?

With Blog 365, a fairly large share of bloggers are just filling up space in their blogs by writing what are often just half-baked posts that were written out of spite. Others turn their blogs into tumblogs and post anything that they find interesting from the Internet, as I divulged in, above.

Is this a bad thing? Well, let’s wait and see.