The fact that I just ran across John Perry's essay on Structured Procrastination (via pmarca), 12 years after it was first posted, proves there are still big opportunities ahead in search, collaborative filtering, and recommendation systems.
John's essay explains my daily existence, and how to turn a "bad habit" into an effective strategy:
"This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an
amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into
effective human beings... The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing
absolutely nothing...the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and
important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing
something more important. Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact."
It's short and concise -- definitely worth a read if you're not 100% satisfied with your ability to get things done.
