Procrastination

procrastinationEach week I wonder what I’ll decide to write as my next blog post. Ideally, a theme moves into my thoughts by Saturday or Sunday. If not, I pray that one will float down on Monday (picture the Baroque era’s theatrical deus ex machina lobbing perfectly polished words onto my stage).

And now it is Tuesday afternoon. A summer storm is brewing. The thunder scares my old border collie who is cowering at my feet. Josie is almost deaf and can no longer hear us calling her to go outside, but she still hears the distant rumbling of thunder.

Four or five ideas vie for my attention. Yet none of them is winning me over. Maybe I need to give it more time. Or . . . maybe I’m just procrastinating.

I have a long relationship with procrastination. Let’s face it, we all have plenty to do. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, paying the bills, mowing the yard, and, oh yes, studying and writing. And they need to be done by someone.

My problem, though, is not the work involved in doing of these tasks, but my stubborn resistance to beginning them. The Romans had a good word for this problem: procrastinatio, built from the prefix pro (forward) and crastinus (belonging to tomorrow). Many of us learned this maxim as children:

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

I hated that sentence. Plus, aren’t there times when things can be put off to good result? Perhaps that is what Mark Twain had in mind when he quipped:

Do not put off till tomorrow what can be put off till day-after-tomorrow just as well.

I’m glad I didn’t know that saying growing up! I’d have used it and gotten in even more trouble.

But, seriously now, procrastination causes total train wrecks in one’s life. Not-so-funny memories of my student procrastination came flooding back to me two weeks ago at a conference in California when a young man—rising senior as I recall—dropped by to buy a copy of my new book Why Freshman Fail. We talked at length. He said if the book helped him avoid one problem, it was worth it.

I agreed he’d be aided by various parts of the book and summarized the main points as I put it in the bag. “Oh, those things don’t worry me,” he said (he may find out differently when he gets to college!). He worried about his penchant for procrastination.

He got more sympathy from me than he expected. I shared my struggles with procrastination growing up. Regular duties were hard for me, especially practicing the piano. It was really not until graduate school that I figured out a solution to procrastination. It came down to numbers. One day a peer said:

You know, Carol. You spend more time and effort “not doing” something, than doing it.

Suddenly, the light dawned. I saw it as an equation. On one side, the X amount of energy needed to accomplish a task; on the other, the 5x amount of energy spent procrastinating. Mathematically, procrastination took more effort. Who knew?

It wasn’t a complete cure, but it helped. I began to step back and look at my habits of procrastination, seeing them as wastes of energy. Wouldn’t it be more fun to spend that energy doing something I actually wanted to do?

I still enjoy the intensity of pushing against a deadline in some cases. For example, when leading tours, I often like to get my boots on the ground before completing the preparation of lectures that are linked to the destination and the specific group of listeners.

But most of the time, there is no utility in putting things off—only a problem waiting to happen. What if the time runs out? A sentence from our Sunday liturgy hits me hard every time we say it:

We confess that we have sinned against Thee in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.

These words imply far greater things than neglecting to empty the dishwasher. No matter how much we accomplish during our human experience, we are going to fall short. I’m convinced that, looking back across years, it will be the bitterness of a letter not answered, a phone call not made, or regret over a kindness not extended that will cause us to shed the most tears.

I couldn’t say all of this to my young visitor. He had plenty to think about just learning not to procrastinate on his future term papers. He will discover soon enough the larger implications, as we all do. Meanwhile, I need to stop procrastinating and write my weekly entry. Except . . . perhaps I just did.

Image: Rennett Stowe (CC BY 2.0)