The magic of a deadline

"Kal kare so aaj kar,Aaj kare so ab"--> Kabir

This timeless adage is a gem of a statement. The world will solve 80%

of its problems by adopting such an approach. Translated into english,

it reads as, "Do today whatever you would do tomorrow, do now whatever

you intend to do today". This is also one of the most misunderstood

proverbs. People literally translate it and ask questions like "How can

you do something whatever you have to do tomorrow?". Examples are taken

of classes, train journeys and believe it or not, performing ablutions.

Basically what the great man wanted to convey was that procrastination

had to be avoided. Procrastination leads to great trouble. Such a case

happened with me today.

The task that i had been assigned was to develop a program in MATLAB

for one of the classical problems in Power System Dynamics i.e a plot

of the maximum power transmitted vs critical clearing angle. This

requires only a half an hour calculation of equivalent impedances at

the faulted point, folowed by their attachment to the fault point

followed by network reducton to obtain the reactance between the

machine bus and the infinite bus. Later, one has to write a few

statements to incorporate this into a program. Ideally, allowing time

for debugging, this should have taken a maximum of 2 hours.

What actually happened was a gross procrastination. This assignment was

pushed around for a week. The prof finally lost patience today and

ordered that the assignment be solved in the lab and submitted in the

evening. Man, you should have seen how quickly the job was done. Now,

if only i had done it earlier...