The Joys of Procrastination

Is it possible? Can one really procrastinate and still feel good about it?

If you look at the results, you can only say: why not?

Wise people say that procrastination is optimism. It’s based on the belief that tomorrow exists.

I am willing to say that procrastination is one of the most underrated, least understood, and unnecessarily degraded aspect of human nature. So this piece is an attempt to change this perception.

I believe one can achieve much more through procrastination - all we need is a little bit of creativity and common sense. Our heart will leap with joy once it realizes that procrastination is a natural human trait and can be used as a growth and productivity hack.

Does procrastination mean that you don’t love your work? Absolutely not. As Jerome K. Jerome says, you could be so fascinated with your work that you may sit and look at it for hours! Some people are very shy to accept that they are procrastinators, so they use innovative terms to describe their nature. For example their CVs may say: “performs well under pressure”. All it means is that they perform only at the last minute and nothing makes them more productive than the pressure of jeopardizing their future.

The opponents of procrastinators usually say: The early bird gets the worm. So if you procrastinate, you lose out on opportunities. My reply to them is to look at it from the worm's perspective. Did it benefit from being out early?

Or some people say: "Procrastination is like a credit card; its lots of fun until you get the bill." But my response is that you are failing to recognize talent here. Procrastinators can do 30 minutes of work in 8 hours normally, but under pressure, they can do 8 hours of work in 30 minutes. Surely, that’s laudable.

Serial procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or filing their nails, or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files/wardrobe/goals one day. Why does the procrastinator do these things? That’s because they are finding a way to avoid doing something more important (or boring/difficult). And this is the important insight we need to make procrastination a productivity hack.

Think about a typical to-do list. From the top down, it’s a priority list. But you when you turn it upside down, it becomes a procrastination list.

Now imagine you have a task that you would love to procrastinate on. Say you have to write an essay/email, or make a telephone call which you should have done ages ago.  Now when your mind is looking for things to do to keep away from the main task, you can pick up your procrastination list and start going through it one by one.

Some of the things I might get done this way are:

- Opening the fitness CD that I purchased when I weighed 10kg less - done

- Cancelling insurance for the car that I sold three months ago - done

- Mowing the grass in my garden which is now knee deep - done

There are simply no limits to what you can accomplish when you are supposed to be doing something else. 

There is another dimension to procrastination which is very interesting. Procrastination simply means to defer or delay an action. If you are delaying purposefully, are you being lazy, or are you being strategic?!

In the fast moving world today, by the time you accomplish a task, the end goals (for your company or yourself) may have changed. Is it not a huge wastage of time, effort, money, and talent that by the time you complete your task, its value is less because it isn’t as critical as it was when you started? If you rely on your gut feel, you’ll see that we humans have a sixth sense by which we can gather from our environment when things are starting to go pear-shaped. 

So delay things up to the point when you are absolutely certain that you will risk your position or credibility by not accomplishing the task. And then rely on your talent of compressing huge output in short bursts of time. It really pays to be strategic.

Let me now rephrase the proverb about the bird and the worm. The early bird did not get the worm. It went home hungry, because the worm was still in bed, strategically procrastinating its morning walk, and contemplating its life ahead. 

Images taken from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/