Before I sat down to write this blog entry I thought I would briefly hop onto stumbleupon.com.

Have you heard of stumbleupon? Please, for the love of anything you are trying to accomplish right now (or anything you may ever want to accomplish in your life) do not discover stumbleupon. You see: what began as a brief “stumble” grew into a full two hours (count ‘em: 2) of clicking on the stumble toolbar.

And this is a heavy, heavy week in my life.

And I really shouldn’t be looking at photos of San Francisco from an airship. Or reading jokes about engineers. Or be watching youtube videos about New York City street-art.

But, I did. And am.

One of the things I have learned since being at college is that there are dozens, nay thousands, of distractions. And this makes things very difficult to accomplish.

For example, right now, I am required to be writing a paper, doing a copious amount of reading, as well as cracking away at my economics homework. But, alas, this is but a pipe dream.

And that often seems to be the case.

The fact is that whenever I sit down to “get serious” about learning economics I more likely “get serious” about hulu.com or some other equally unproductive pastime.

And that is just the Internet.

Ohio State is filled with things that distract me, without even counting the Internet. For example: Thursday included a concert at the Wexner Center (Sea Wolf) I almost went to see (today I skipped the Wex’s Wilco concert, and now regret the decision). Friday was a party at my friend’s apartment. Tonight I should have gone to a club meeting that I skipped “to get work done”. Tomorrow is looking like a similar situation, during which time I will probably end up at nearby Kafé Kerouac to read instead of doing my assignments. And Wednesday is not for doing homework. Heck no. I don’t even want to explain to you how ridiculous it is for you to assume I could do work on Wednesday. Wednesday? Are you serious? That’s like doing work on Thursday! Which is NOT going to happen.

And then it’s Friday.

So, yes. I will fail out this quarter.

But then again, I have had distractions ever since beginning in academics. Granted, the original distractions were dinosaur figurines and boxes of Legos, so I feel like the ability to overcome such tantalizing temptations as those have given me strength to oppose such silliness as Facebook or my roommates on the front porch.

And yet, resistance is weak. And I feel myself being drawn more heavily toward maybe preparing a sandwich, cleaning my room, or going on a walk across the oval. Maybe instead of homework I will apply to be a civilian astronaut on the NASA website. Or sew a pirate flag for my Subaru, recently nicknamed The Green Scurvy due to her privateering ways.

I could always alphabitize my bookshelf.

Or go to the neighbors’ to see what’s up.

Or put something into the crock-pot for dinner tomorrow night.

Or record a youtube video of stop-animated paper clips doing the Macarena.

Or head down to Buckeye Donuts for some late night Pumpkin Spice donuts.

No matter what I do (go to bed early?), it won’t be homework.

My advice is this: plan your time wisely. As in literally block out portions of your schedule for things like “homework” and “facebook”. It doesn’t need to be a formal system, I usually handle it in my brain (as in, not written down) with something along the lines of: “Go to Alex’s apartment form 3-5:30, after: prepare and eat dinner, then write paper until 12am, and finally jump on digg.com until ready to sleep.”

Of course, the back-up plan is always failing out of college. Which, with the level of interesting that I am finding on stumbleupon.com, seems more and more reasonable.

-Andrew