There are many ways to avoid things and events in life, but the most sure-fire way just might be procrastination( for a more scholarly article see hers)
Many of us go through life with an array of undone tasks, large and small, nibbling at our conscience. Indeed twenty percent of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators. For them procrastination is a lifestyle, albeit a maladaptive one. And it cuts across all domains of their life. They don't pay bills on time. They miss opportunities for buying tickets to concerts. They don't cash gift certificates or checks. They file income tax returns late. They leave their Christmas shopping until Christmas eve. They wait till the last moment to turn in their papers.
There is, however, more than one flavor of procrastination. Dr. Ferrari, associate professor of psychology at De Paul University in Chicago, identifies three basic types of procrastinators: arousal types, or thrill-seekers, who wait to the last minute for the euphoric rush; avoiders, who may be avoiding fear of failure or even fear of success, but in either case are very concerned with what others think of them; they would rather have others think they lack effort than ability; and the decisional procrastinators, who cannot make a decision for not making a decision absolves procrastinators of the responsibility for the outcome of events.
All these procrastinators justify their reluctance to prompt actions in various ways. Such as, "I'll feel more like doing this tomorrow." Or "I work best under pressure." Or “ I am more creative when under time pressure”. I asked two of these self proclaimed procrastinators why they did it. One said “ I do some of my best work when I have a deadline. That is when my creative juices flow best”. The other said that he would give me a reply but, uh, later!
In real life, these procrastinators actively look for distractions, particularly ones that don't take a lot of commitment on their part. Checking e-mail is almost perfect for this purpose. So are any kind of hobbies even constant cleaning or indeed gourmet cooking! Anything, it seems, that will allow them to avoid doing the things that they know they need to do.
Unfortunately many a time, procrastinators will deliberately sabotage themselves and put obstacles in their own path. They may even sometimes actually choose paths that hurt their performance. The fact is that procrastination is not really a problem of time management or of planning. Procrastinators are not different in their ability to estimate time, although they are more optimistic than others. "Telling someone who procrastinates to buy a weekly planner is like telling someone with chronic depression to just cheer up," insists Dr. Ferrari.
It is said that procrastinators are made not born. According to one theory, procrastination is learned in the family milieu, but not directly. It is one response to an authoritarian parenting style. Having a harsh, controlling father keeps children from developing the ability to regulate themselves, from internalizing their own intentions and then learning to act on them. It can even be a form of rebellion; one of the few forms available under such circumstances. Contrarily, it can also be a response to an absence of any parental discipline. If no one is imposing deadlines, why bother to do what are clearly less fun things to do. What's more, under these household conditions, procrastinators turn more to friends than to parents for support, and their friends may reinforce procrastination because they tend to be tolerant of their excuses. I have some difficulty with these theories because I have two children one of whom is “gung ho, lets go” type while the other is, lets just say, incredibly relaxed about all deadlines.
Procrastination has always interested philosophers because of its underlying irrationality. They are interested in procrastination because it is a powerful example of what the Greeks called akrasia—doing something against one’s own better judgment. Indeed the essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing but almost anything else. Socrates believed that akrasia was, strictly speaking, impossible, since we could not want what is bad for us; if we act against our own interests, it must be because we don’t know what’s right, that we are ignorant. Another perplexing thing about procrastination is that although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy.
We often procrastinate not by doing fun tasks but by doing jobs whose only allure is that they aren’t what we should be doing. So a fuller explanation of procrastination really needs to take account of our attitudes to the tasks being avoided. Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination. Many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that, of course, creates a vicious cycle.
Viewed this way, procrastination starts to look less like a question of mere ignorance than like a complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict. A radical explanation for the gap between what we want to do and what we end up doing is the explanation that the person who makes plans and the person who fails to carry them out are not really the same person! At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber where two factions contend, where your short-term interests faction (having fun, putting off work, and so on) is locked in mortal combat with your other faction, which represents your long-term goals. But, if that’s the case, it’s not obvious how you’d ever get anything done: the short-term self, it seems, would always win out. The philosopher Don Ross offers a persuasive solution to the problem. For Ross, the various parts of the self are all present at once, constantly competing and bargaining with one another—one that wants to work, one that wants to watch television, and so on. The key, for Ross, is that although the television-watching self is interested only in watching TV, it’s interested in watching TV not just now but also in the future. This means that it can be bargained with: working now will let you watch more television down the road. Procrastination, in this reading, is the result of a bargaining process gone wrong.
Of course, the easier explanation is that procrastination is really a failure of will and we should seek ways to strengthen the will. This isn’t a completely fruitless task: much recent research suggests that will power is, in some ways, like a muscle and can be made stronger. The same research, though, also suggests that most of us have a limited amount of will power and that it’s easily exhausted. In one famous study, people who had been asked to restrain themselves from readily available temptation—in this case, a pile of chocolate-chip cookies that they weren’t allowed to touch—had a harder time persisting in a difficult task than people who were allowed to eat the cookies.
Since procrastination is driven, in part, by the gap between effort (which is required now) and reward (which you reap only in the future, if ever), narrowing that gap, by whatever means necessary, will clearly help. Since open-ended tasks with distant deadlines are much easier to postpone than focused, short-term projects, dividing projects into smaller, more defined sections helps. Another way of making procrastination less likely is to reduce the amount of choices we have: often when people are afraid of making the wrong choice they end up doing nothing. Procrastination often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of it is worth doing. Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all. In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which.
Since procrastination is a learned behavior, can we change it? There are a whole host of books available that claim to remove this blight from your personal life and strengthen your will power. There are a lot of self-help courses you can take. When I urge the procrastinators in my family to enroll, the only reply I get is – later, later.
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