Stop thinking you’re Don Draper at once!
Don Draper, main character of the cult TV-show Mad Men: the perfect embodiment of style, wit and profoundness. And who stays all day long lying on his couch, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey… when he’s not lying in bed with some married woman. Don Draper: the most achieved example of the procrastinator? Not really. Instead a rather exaggerated portrayal of the troubled and creative genius.
Too many people mistake procrastination with sloth, or simple leisure.
Procrastination is not the art of not doing anything. Rather, the art of putting all our energy in avoiding to do something in particular.
Procrastinate, procrastinate!
Recent studies demonstrate that our tendency for procrastination is inscribed in our genes. Well, we already know how attempting to struggle with our vice only worsens it most of the time. Therefore, why fight it?
As such, procrastination can turn out to be an extremely productive and creative process. To avoid a deadline, what better way than to take care all of the small and boring tasks we’ve been desperately trying not to do? Or, on the opposite, what more suitable time to initiate a big project we’ve been thinking about for as long as we can remember when we wish to postpone the moment to sit down and face our administrative requirements? To take our minds off a coming presentation, we find ourselves contacting long-lost people, we chat them up…
Any excuse works. And any good excuse opens up new possibilities, unveils new horizons.
To master one’s own nature, one must first give in to it.
Obviously, we shouldn’t take it too lightly either. In our working life (among others), procrastination can be an irretrievable affliction, a handicap, a curse! No one’s denying it. It’s mentally and physically absolutely exhausting.
Mainly because of the guilt it stirs up. If not towards our boss, towards ourselves.
That’s why one must work to appreciate it for what it’s worth. Not to try to eradicate it (well, if you want to try, be my guest), but to channel it. Because, like it or not, some tasks have to be done according to a schedule.
Various tactics and techniques can help you become a “structured procrastinator”: If one assignment doesn’t give you any immediate joy or satisfaction, link the unpleasantness of the task with a personal reward. Make good use of the “salami technique”: divide into several small tasks, individually flavorous, or at least bearable, what seemed perfectly undoable as a whole. Or, of course, there are the famous to-do-lists, namely the pleasure to cross out amuck one line at a time.
Ah, the simple pleasures of life…
The art of idleness.
We desperately try to identify the cause for our curse: it’s in our genes! It’s because of a weak self-esteem; it’s because we’re perfectionists; or impulsive; or rather because we have a poor appreciation of time; because we only seek immediate gratifications…
Let’s pause for a moment with John Perry’s recent book, The Art of Procrastination.
For procrastination is, above all, the proof showing how much we are possessed by contradictory feelings and desires; how much our curious minds like to wander through different paths; how we instinctively refuse constraints which we consider too rigid or coercive.
The whole art of idleness, in the end, resides in the challenge and difficulty to incorporate these irreducible spaces of freedom into the carrying out of mandatory assignments, equally irreducible.
May this article, probably read to postpone something you had to do, help you realize what a beautiful thing procrastination is. And how crucial it is to treat it with care in order to make it our ally.