For those of us blessed with the need for convenience, at its most potent and circumspect, the ability to take no corner that may be cut, to streamline a process on par with the boarding and take-off of an EasyJet flight, ‘nere a nanosecond is misspent is a wily art. Theydies and Gentlethem, I present to you, The Little-celebrated and Underappreciated Warp Speed Highway to Convenience; Procrastination.
Historically derided as last minute shambolism, doubtless some efforts at a procrastinator’s pull-through are a downright disaster, especially when the practitioner is uninitiated in this art.
Indeed, procrastination is often hailed as a double-edged sword for this precise reason; when time-blindness or task initiation issues lead to underwhelming, if not utter mediocrity. But procrastination is not a double-edged anything. It is a chisel. One that when wielded with skill, can produce works of staggering magnificence. You didn’t see Michelangelo hacking David out of marble with a sword, did you?
For the skilled procrastinator then, there comes a time when suddenly the time-blindness and task initiation confabulation, and most importantly, the deafening scream of an impending deadline combine to spark combustion, and the magic machine is set in motion. Pure, diamond focus.
Whilst traditional best-practices for task completion decry this as heresy, several conveniences are immediately evident. Cursory preliminaries are dispatched, brainstorming, which doubtless has been fermenting in nebular form, is now nailed down without a dither or dilly dally. There is no time for whimsical “What if’s”. Only the task. Only the task. This paves the way for a decisive scythe through time-consuming initial project planning prescribed by the Planned and Methodical approach that so eludes the procrastinator. Like some apotropaic talisman, the deadline now aligns all disparate creative and critical thinking skills, infusing them with a sense of hopeless dread and pointed frustration at the Me from Before who did not and would not make a start in order to avoid this horror once again.
This seems to be the progression for the first 40 years or so, at least, it has been, in my experience. Until I discovered that that is just how my brain works. I am not alone, and it is not any better or worse than the other way, just different.
Why then, is the last-minute approach so stigmatised? Apart from the fact that it can lead to missed deadlines and sloppy work when not leveraged correctly, it is also less understood.
Moves to advocate for different approaches to… well, everything, can be traced back to the movement to decolonise the western psyche and by default, culturally accepted work practices in the globalised workplace of the 21st Century.
Michelle Mi Jeung Kim, author of The Wake Up: Closing The Gap Between Good Intentions and Real Change (2021) writes about this privileging of certain characteristics “both overtly and covertly […] while devaluing, often with penalty, traits that deviate from them”. These include, but are not limited to; perfectionism, a sense of urgency, focus on protecting power, only one right way. The entire list is far too long to even include all the highlights, but you get the idea. This lingering hangover from paternalism; the ideology of one right way, is one that thankfully, the 21st Century is tackling with gusto, thanks to social media platforms worldwide.
Right away, we can see that the Procrastinator, whilst certainly complying with the perfectionism and sense of urgency of this workplace culture, deviates considerably from the qualities listed above and only heads more left field as the stakes increase. The most noticeable difference is in the timeline. The closer the deadline, the more frequent the “Have you started/How’s it going?” questions become, the greater the impulse to lie. “It’s going great! Nearly finished!”
Everyone involved knows that this is a falsehood. It’s not going great. It’s not going, on any plane outside of the subconscious mind. But conversely, how many times have the requirements of the task morphed/been declared unnecessary or just plain forgotten about? If you do it at the last minute, you only ever do the necessary, in the most convenient way.
Unfortunately, in a world filled with SMART goals and Pomodoro techniques and SENSA apps to provide structure and planning which will help to avoid procrastination, not enough time and energy is spent helping those of us who do not and cannot follow that process or timelines to achieve mindboggling brilliance in a different way.
In his epic book, (I will finish it soon), The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing, author John Perry argues that structured procrastinators get more done, more effectively.
As sweeping generalisations go, it seems preposterous, but if and when the procrastinator gets their procrasta-chakras aligned, this way of approaching life has undeniable advantages.
For those still growing in their procrasta-chrysalis, Perry offers some alternative best practices for procrastination for those wired this way. He advocates for structured procrastination.
This means that instead of festering in a sorry pile of guilt in the interim time between project initiation and completion, procrastinators relax into this time, complete other projects, or simply put the conceptual pieces in place for when the chisel hits the marble.
Procrastination is born of perfectionism in many cases, a perfectionism that is both Jekyll and Hyde to the desire to create a work of subliminal magnificence. The procrastinator cannot begin because they can foresee the magnitude of the task, but not the way to cut through it yet, because they have been taught that the sword is the tool to use.
Oh, but once that chisel gets a-tapping and the sand is all but through the hourglass, what a thing of beauty it is to behold.
For 4 decades, I believed that I was broken, unable to comprehend the simple dusty magic of the planners and prepping and process, but my little people at home shrugged when I suggested these methods for their increasingly gnarly school projects. “It works for me”, said one, on the eve of a mighty deadline. Even I could hear it hollering on the horizon. As with so much in life, this organic reproduction of traits I had been taught to disparage in myself are perceived by my own offspring, and their unequivocally healthier understanding of the world as “just different”. This in itself has helped me to be kinder to myself.
Unpacking the hackers guide to “now in a minute” then for my own Chislers, some ways to mitigate the utter mediocrity that plagues the procrastinator that work for me include:
- Procrastinate more effectively by getting busier. That’s right! Add to the pile! Got two projects you can’t begin? Take on another, even more audacious one! Ludicrous even! Fuel that fire! One of the deadlines will soon start screaming like a harpy, and there is nothing like running into a wall in Project A to awaken a morbid desire to dig into the intricacies of Project C.
- Forget linear approaches. Begin at the end. Do the bits that interest you. Put it together like Frankenstein’s monster. Attack it however it takes your fancy. Michaelangleo for sure didn’t begin his David at the top of his head and finish at his sandaled toes; that’s just not how it goes. Embrace your own process, and stop apologising for it.
- There is SUCH GREAT POWER IN BEGINNING! As our procrastinator is either a perfectionist, in which case they cannot begin because the enormity of the task is simply too overwhelming, or suffers from time-blindness in where all moments outside of the current moment are irrelevant and so far away as to be absolutely inconsequential, beginning with the aspect that most intrigues or delights you can often engage the hyperdrive, and you might well emerge 13 hours later with two completed projects, a full bladder and a hunger that would see you eating the leggy end of a low flying duck. Begin. Not at the start. Just begin.
Procrastination used to be considered a flaw, a fault. And yet the ability to slam out solid gold star work in our ever-changing world is now being reconsidered. Adaptive. Versatile. Pivotal. Instead of spending the decades of self-loathing necessary to understand that planned and methodical processes are just not your sword, pick up that chisel instead.
