Procrastination: a manifesto, draft 838

Procrastination, the hastily-written story goes, is a waste of time and a barrier to success.   Wars are lost, opportunities missed, countless people frustrated and disappointed. 

In 1964 the author Harold Brodkey was signed by Random House to write a novel tentatively titled ‘A Party of Animals’.  Thirty-two years and several publishing houses later, the book was finally published as the appropriately-named ‘The Runaway Soul’.  Reports at the time landed more heavily on the epic delay rather than the quality of the writing.

An artist active in the early 1500s spent 16 years on a painting. In his life he only completed about 15 works.  His name was Leonardo da Vinci.

What if procrastination isn’t a universally bad thing? What if Brodkey or Leonardo needed every moment to make their work as good as it could be?  What if Brodkey’s novel is both medium and some sort of meta-message?

Our dislike of procrastination is often passionate.  In a Nigerian study, published in 2013, researchers attempted to create an economic model of the cost of procrastination. They calculated a daily cost equivalent to twenty percent of a serial procrastinator’s annual salary.  I have my doubts about the model (how can the ‘cost’ be that precise?) but the accompanying narrative makes it clear that this study was a passion project for the authors.

“Procrastination”, they write, “has a high potential for painful consequences. It is putting off till tomorrow what one ought to have done today. It is sometimes also euphemistically termed the ‘thief of time’… the tendency to regard scheduled commencement time of an event as a mere suggestion and not the time the event is actually expected to commence, for example delays in acquiring further education, starting an industry or enterprise, building, getting married, etc.”  The text reads like a lecture from an exit interview.

Procrastination can, of course, have rippling consequences.  Unchecked or in the wrong context, it can be dangerous, deleterious, dysfunctional (put down the thesaurus and get on with it, Hamish – Ed.), but a growing body of clinical work suggests that conscious procrastination can also have positive consequences, especially in the creative industries. Often, the procrastinator will argue, ideas just need a little more time.

By today’s standards I’m a procrastinator and proud.  I will frequently (but not always) submit my work as my nose begins to cave in against the wall of the deadline.  I don’t enjoy this process, but I know that I need to wrestle with an idea until I’m sure it’s the best option.  Sometimes I’ll appear to be putting an idea down to do something else.  The truth is that I’m taking it for a walk in an unrelated landscape to put it to a fresh test.

Our modern appetites for immediacy, have in my view, reset  - in equally consequential and dysfunctional ways - a world in which haste is more important than quality and effectiveness.  What is seen as procrastination today might have felt reasonable several years ago.  The relentless drive for efficiency, our appetite for ‘real time solutions’, is having a diminishing effect on creativity.

The public relations industry, for instance – one that I know well – is beset by the pressures of ‘now’.  Ask a journalist wading through several hundred emails on the way to work each morning how many of those announcements, pitches and comments meet the quality threshold that he, she, they expect, and the answer will be “a fraction”.  Worse still, the amount of ‘content’ (let’s call it ‘slurry’ maybe) they’re having to look through causes delay in getting to the meat.

The best examples of creativity are rarely on tap.  Sometimes there’ll be an early epiphany, but for the most part there’s a lot of slog attached.  It’s an essential part of the process.

A lot of that process might look like work avoidance to an onlooker.  But my contention is that the work is still happening.  Conscious procrastinators aren’t shelving the task or postponing effort.  Their minds are locked in a struggle to find the necessary elements of the answer and to piece them together in the best possible way.  It’s like any cryptic puzzle. Sometimes the answer is instantaneous.  Mostly it requires a wander through seemingly unrelated thoughts or activities to get a purchase on how to crack this nut.

Today’s tyranny is time, both for the procrastinator and for the customer.  Capitalism has become an impatient and unforgiving constraint.  Almost every aspect of what we trade, buy, browse, deliver, eat, wear and more is experienced through the lens of something approaching immediacy.  It is relentless. We talk about ‘first mover advantage’, never ‘best mover advantage’.

Next day deliveries are now surrendering to the pressure of same day deliveries.  Streaming services and ISPs are pummelled if they have ‘down time’ or if a movie ‘buffers’.  Mid-week non-microwavable meals are viewed with disdain.  References from a Google search to ‘ready in minutes’, ‘make it in minutes’, ‘build it in minutes’ and ‘available now’ can be counted in the billions.  See also ‘instant design’, ‘instant art’ and ‘instant content’.

This is a extraordinary reversal in our understanding of value.  When Henry Ford’s production line ground to a halt he called in a specialist for help.  The specialist walked into the factory, spent half a minute looking at bit of machinery, drew an x on the side of a tank and within half an hour had finished the job.  Ford was back in business.  A few days later he received an invoice for $1,000.  Outraged at the sum (a lot of money at the time), Ford wrote to the specialist and asked for a breakdown of his costs.  He wrote back: “$1 to move the valve, $999 to know where to move the valve to.”

Today the tables have turned.  We’ve come to value haste, but unlike the Ford example, it’s frequently to our cost.  Around the world, there are millions of people with job titles like ‘content manager’, ‘head of content’, ‘content director’.  These activities, as described, sound like box-filling exercises, more concerned with fulfilment in the delivery sense than fulfilment as we used to understand it.  QED.

My theory is that what we now regard as procrastination is connected to the polarisation that afflicts so much of our lives these days.  In much the same way as a country’s politicians might define a centrist approach as ‘far left’ when their own views have lurched to the extreme right, conventional and rational expectations of reasonable timeframes have been warped by the lure of immediacy.  If your expectation has skewed to ‘immediate’ or ‘tomorrow’, a wait of a week is going to feel unreasonable.

Immediacy, I’d argue, has its own costs. In a 2014 study psychologist David Rosenbaum from Pennsylvania State University defined a condition that calls ‘precrastination’: an incessant need to tick things off our to-do list driven by deadline anxiety.   He likened it to our unquestioning tendency to pick up a heavy item when entering a supermarket instead of picking it up just before heading to the checkout.  Rosenbaum attributes the condition to the contemporary need to be seen doing something rather than questioning whether it is a productive use of time.

In his study, college students were asked to carry a bucket to finish line in the most efficient way possible. Students could either carry the bucket from halfway down their lane or pick up the bucket closest to the finish line. The majority of students chose the bucket closest to them.  Rosenbaum wrote “Precrastination is a tendency to work on tasks at the earliest opportunity—even if it means more work or comes with extra costs.”

Time is the currency we trade for excellence.  Taking a little more time will, for the most part, deliver a better and more durable result.

How do we slow things down a bit?  How do we change a world that trades quality for efficiency?

Here’s what I do:

1.     Remember that our first ideas are rarely our best ideas.  Take that, precrastinators!

2.     Create an ‘inaction list’, comprising the thoughts that you think have merit but can’t find a home for.  You’ll find it eventually.

3.     Put two unrelated things on your desk every morning and spend some time trying to find a connection.

4.     Put today’s date into Wikipedia and see what other things happened on this day in history.  Ideas adhere to strange symmetries.

5.     Create your own paper-based internet.  Collect books of strange facts and lists.  The world is a cauldron.

6.     Solvitur ambulando: take a problem for a walk.  This always works in some way.

7.     Read a good short poem, especially one steeped in similes and metaphors.

8.     Visit aldaily.com, an invaluable compendium of links to the best and latest thinking, and take a trip in a couple of fresh directions.

9.     Have a look at some cartoons from the New Yorker.  They’re a lateral thinker’s delight.

10.  Abandon Google Maps for 30 mins and see where the road takes you.  There’s always something interesting off the well-worn path.

11.  Above all, remind yourself of the joy of anticipation.  That’s the wellspring from which the best ideas are drawn.