Puttering
Puttering conveys to most people the idea of dawdling; a putterer is regarded as a person who spends more time than is necessary on trifling and unimportant tasks and delays as much as possible attacking the more difficult and essential things. Yet all putterers are not dawdlers, nor is all puttering quite such a waste of time as it appears to an unsympathetic observer. People’s minds do not all work in the same way; are not all stimulated to activity by operations of the same sort. Those enviable persons whose processes of thought are always clear, orderly and logical do not putter. If they work in the garden they proceed in a methodical manner with their digging or their planting or their pruning. If they occupy themselves with tasks of a mechanical nature, they do not turn from one half completed job to another; they stick at one thing until it is finished. Whatever they do, they do, they like to clean the work up, make an end of it, get it out of the way and not have to be bothered with it again. But the putterer has no such interest or ambition. Whether he is aware of it or not, his puttering is often but a means to an end. He does his gardening or his mechanical jobs unsystematically, abandoning one half-finished task to take up another according to momentary whim, usually putting off the most difficult to the last. That desultory manner of work is not always to be explained as the result of indolence. A good many people whom the clear-thinking, hard-driving workers stigmatize either as indolent or as lacking in energy have to prepare themselves for their harder tasks by puttering over the simpler ones. They are assembling their powers while they putter. They have not the swiftly organizing faculty that those who are likely to be impatient of their lack of method possess, but they often do have a faculty of imagination that their critics lack; and when their minds are finally roused and concentrated on a matter of keen interest to them, they are likely to deal with it so effectively that those who knew them best wonder why persons of such ability are ever content to putter.
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“Puttering,” in The Wetaskiwin [Alberta] Times 24:16 (July 10, 1924) : 3
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15 July 2026