Constructive procrastinating

What would the world be like without Google? It has entered our world and carved itself in stone in such little time. When we do a search for something in the internet we say 'Google it', even if we use other browsers, much like when we say we do the hoovering - Hoover is a make of vacuum cleaner, not the actual  cleaner itself. And this week I asked myself the question again.

I had already asked myself. I ask myself a lot of things. A couple of months ago Google celebrated the late Robert Moog's birthday on their browser page...and before I managed to ask myself I had already said goodbye to a couple of hours of my day. The same thing happened this week during the Olympics. They goddamn googled me in, got me more involved than my productive working world that just caved in around it, and just when I have more enough to be getting on with in this period, I was succumbed by Google's Darth Vader hand to the procrastinate dark side.

Only it was not really dark. It was a light moment. Innovation prevailed, the bulb in my brain was switched on more than any work project at work could do. Their homepage doodle of the Moog synthesizer stopped me in my tracks, within minutes I forgot what I was actually searching for, lost in a warp of mouse clicks tapped on the piano keyboard, swept away by it's distorted sounds on the knobs of oscillators and filters as I tweaked and twisted them through the power of a click. Then as a friend came on facebook and told me how you could use the keyboard to play the Moog, well, that was me completely pulled in. And I can't even play a musical instrument.

Why did it do this to me? Is it because I am a wannabe musician? I don't really think so. I think it was because it was creation staring me in the face, innovation at my fingertips, and that it is actually someone's job to have made the browser page.

The same page that took away so many minutes of my day this week. Every day it changed for a different sport in the Olympic Games, another Google doodle, another quirky design until one day Lord Vader held out his hand again and my fingertips met the call. I canoed my way through the course, determined each time to beat my previous time. Why did it do this to me? I'm not a playstation owner or junkie. Is it because I love video games? Again, I don't really think so. It is because it was fun, it was a good start to the day, and it got me involved.

I have always been guilty of procrastination, and it can still rear its head even when I have a queue of more important and pressing things beeping its horn at me, telling me to move along and get the jam moving. But saying that, was I procrastinating? My mind was alive, it was building the day feeding on its hearty breakfast. I was working, in my own kinda way, or if I remember rightly, I justified to myself that it was a way of warming up my muscles to a working day.

The Moog and what it can do is in all of us, it can summon a sense of unlimited space. Just let us mess around with it. We can invent, we can explore, We are free to try and try and make something we want. We can constantly try to better ourselves. In the words of Thomas Edison: "I have not failed 700 times, I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that these 700 ways will not work".

And I succeeded in proving that you can constructively procrastinate.