In defence of procrastination

I have written often about my family and their procrastinating ways. So to balance the scales, here is a defence of procrastination.

The tendency to procrastinate dates back to the very beginnings of civilization. As early as 1400 B.C., ancient Egyptians were struggling with basic time management. “Friend, stop putting off work and allow us to go home in good time,” read some hieroglyphs. Six hundred years later, in 800 B.C., the early Greek poet Hesiod voiced a similar feeling,warning us not to “put your work off till tomorrow and the day after, for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work.” In 44 B.C., Cicero deemed  “slowness and procrastination” always “hateful.” 

The sentiment survived intact through more recent times. In 1751, Samuel Johnson remarked, “The folly of allowing ourselves to delay what we know cannot be finally escaped is one of the general weaknesses which, in spite of the instruction of moralists, and the remonstrances of reason, prevail to a greater or lesser degree in every mind; even they who most steadily withstand it find it, if not the most violent, the most pertinacious of their passions, always renewing its attacks, and, though often vanquished, never destroyed.” He concluded that it was “natural,” if not praiseworthy or desirable, “to have particular regard to the time present.”

The twenty-first century seems no different. Students procrastinate instead of doing their schoolwork. In one study, thirty-two per cent of surveyed university students were found to be severe procrastinators—meaning that their procrastination had gone from being an annoyance to an actual problem—while only one per cent claimed that they never procrastinated at all. Employees procrastinate instead of taking care of their office tasks.The average employee, one survey found, spends about an hour and twenty minutes each day putting off work; that time, in turn, translates to a loss of about nine thousand dollars per worker per year. In a study conducted in 2007, about a quarter of surveyed adults reported that procrastination was one of their defining personality traits.

It seems that procrastination is a common pulse of humanity. We’ve all likely experienced the feeling: there’s that project we have to finish, that email we have to send, that phone call we need to make. But somehow, despite our best intentions, we never seem to get any closer to doing it.  Strangely the one thing that defines procrastination isn’t a lack of intention to work, it's the difficulty of following through on that intention. For most of us, procrastination isn’t a pleasant experience. It’s not like blowing off a meeting or a class and feeling the freedom of rebellion; it’s a feeling of growing pressure—of knowing we’ll have to deal eventually with whatever it is we’re putting off.

About ninety five percent of people who procrastinate wish they could reduce that tendency because procrastination leads to lower over-all well-being, worse health, and lower salaries. Why, then, is procrastination such a common phenomenon? If we don’t particularly want to procrastinate, and it causes us discomfort to do so, why do we persist in doing it? Ah! there's rub!

Various studies show that one finding in particular is common : excessive procrastinators were worse at self-regulating. In fact, self-regulation—the ability to exercise self-control and delay immediate rewards for future benefits—explained seventy per cent of the observed procrastination behaviors. What if procrastination was simply the flip side of impulsivity? Just as impulsivity is a failure of our self-control mechanisms—we should wait, but instead we act now—so, too, is procrastination: we should act now, but instead we wait.

  

If we think of procrastination as the flip side of impulsivity—as a failure of self-control rather than a failure of ambition—then the way we approach it shifts. When it comes to self-control, one trick that tends to work well is to reframe broad, ambitious goals in concrete, manageable, immediate chunks, and the same goes for procrastination. “We know there is a lot of naturally occurring motivation as deadlines approach,” Dr. Piers Steel,one of the world’s leading researchers and speakers on the science of motivation and procrastination, pointed out. “Can you create artificial deadlines to mimic the same thing?”

Thus what procrastinators can do is to make their targets as small, immediate, and specific as possible. For instance, Steel uses timed ten-minute sessions to get started on tasks that he doesn’t quite want to do. “The problem with a goal we’re avoiding is that we’ve already built into our minds how awful it’s going to be,” he said. “So it’s like diving into a cold pool: the first few seconds are terrible, but soon it feels great.” So, set the goal of working on a task for a short time, and then reassess. Often, you’ll be able to stay on task once you’ve overcome that initial jump. “You don’t say, ‘I am going to write.’ You say, ‘I will complete four hundred words by two o’clock,’ ” Steel says. “The more specific, the more powerful. That’s what gets us going.”

The other part  is to identify the “hot” conditions for impulse control—those moments when you’re most prone to give in to distraction—and find ways to deal with them directly. “One of the easiest things to do is to realize that maybe it’s your distractions, not your goals, that are the problem,” said Steel. “So you make the distractions harder to get to. Make them less obvious.” He points to an Android app that makes it more difficult for people to access the games on their phones.

Of course, if you are an excessive procrastinator you may be unlikely to install such a program. “The ironic thing is that procrastinators put off dealing with their procrastination,” Steel said. So instead of doing whatever you’re supposed to be doing right now, take a test! That is sure to delay everything!