If you have a head full of monumental things you wish to complete, as pretty much everyone I know does, you have no doubt suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous procrastination. Happens to me all the time. 'Tis easier to blog and watch the turgid wake that develops behind that particular boat than it is to work on another chapter of my novel.
Yet there is another form of artistic endeavor that I have far less trouble with, simply because once the first step is taken–say, the very easy step of recording the rhythm guitar track–the rest of working in a studio becomes absorbing. (Granted, getting the drive to just pick up the guitar and do it can be tough, too.) Finding the perfect compression to make the snare drum pop just right may sound dreadfully drab, but it's easy to get sucked into such a thing for a couple of hours or even far more. It's an interesting dynamic, the pull between the abstract notion (I want to record my song) and the specific (the solo peters out instead of building to a peak). Get sucked into the project, and the specifics drive the whole thing right along.
Anyhow, it turns out a recent psychological study addressed this tension of abstraction versus detail and came up with some interesting results. Over at PsyBlog, you'll find this overview of that study and other recent studies of proscrastination and how to overcome it, with a handy summary of methods these studies found to work well.
Perhaps most intriguing was the pairing of Georges Seurat pointillist images, one close-up and one zoomed out, as a prompter of procrastination. So if you're feeling like putting something off, maybe just try staring at the close-up Seurat image down below–apparently it prompted the quickest turnaround times in the experiment, for reasons best read about at the Psyblog post.
