Ways I procrastinated on my presentation
Hey, I’m presenting at History Camp Boston on August 9!
(Assuming I stop dillydallying.)
Rather than work on my presentation (We haven’t had a president with facial hair in more than a century & other trivial observations), here’s what I’ve been up to:
Got a new PO box finally
Designed and ordered a bunch of stuff to celebrate said PO box and sent a bunch of mail
Visited Hildene, Robert Todd Lincoln’s house, and pulled together a post about it.
Typed up doodles from sketchbooks #8 and 9*
Organized my presidential books**
Decided I want to be the kind of person who swims laps
Swam laps on two separate days!
Read a bunch of books, including some excellent fiction:
The Edge of Water, by Olufunke Grace Bankole
Happy Land, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
An Oral History of Atlantis, by Ed Park (which lead to me collecting a bunch of tangents)
The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore (which made me want to collect a bunch of thoughts and doodles in a blog, but I didn’t. I found a loophole! If I add them to this post, it does it count as procrastination. Scroll below to find them.***)Wrote a post about procrastinating on my presentation (this one!)
*This one isn’t completely procrastinatey in nature. Typing my sketchbooks makes it easier to find doodles … I found one that I desperately wanted to include in my presentation. And another that I’d completely forgotten about but fits perfectly. Hooray! I’m on sketchbook #14, so I still have a ways to go…
**This one is aspirational. Actually, all I did was rearrange my books to take a picture for my presentation (which means I was working on it!). Now I sometimes just stare at the books strewn all over the ottoman waiting for me to reorganize them. It would take less time to just do it than to think about doing it, but it seems daunting.
I haven’t done nothing
See? I have this fun little roving splotch! Trust me — it’s going to look cool in my presentation. I bet none of the PhDs presenting have a cool splotch in their presentations.
As of writing this, I have 59 slides. The 59 slide are in various states of doneness, ranging from “OMG I LOVE THIS SLIDE” to “I vaguely know what I want to say here.”
FIND OUT IF I FINISH MY PRESENTATION!
I don’t know about you, but I’m on the edge of my seat. Join me at History Camp Boston, August 8-10, 2025. Here are the details. (Check out all of the incredible speakers!)
Procrastination: in pictures
***
I read The God of the Woods by Liz Moore when I should have been working on my presentation. Not only that, but it also kept me up far too late at night thereby reducing my odds for productivity the next day. Double-whammy.
Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern, and the Bouvier family were all unexpectedly mentioned, as was Chester Arthur and FDR’s dad’s alma mater (Union College). So were the Rockefellers and the Roosevelts. And an Emerson I can only assume is Ralph Waldo Emerson. Plus, it was set in the Adirondacks! There were loads of references to places I know, which delighted me every time.
Instead of compiling a blog post about this book (procrastination!), I’ve dumped a few semi-related doodles here. It took hardly any time at all, so it barely counts as procrastination. I’m not even going to tell you which books inspired these doodles, though if you insist on keeping me from my working on my presentation you can certainly ask in the comments below.
Procrastination: sometimes it pays…?
Franklin D. Roosevelt once said “I sometimes think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird, and not the bad luck of the early worm.” I think that means “sometimes procrastination pays.”
Will it pay this time?
There’s only one way to find out.
