Ken Hurley
Procrastination is opportunity’s assassin. – Victor Kiam (Kiam became famous as the owner and spokesman for the Remington shaver. Do you remember his catchphrase? “I liked it so much, I bought the company.”
Procrastination is like a credit card: it’s a lot of fun until you get the bill. – Christopher Parker
I plan to write an essay about procrastination. Really. It took me a long time to get started, because I was struck by the inherent beauty found in the entire outer band of rubber on a tire’s circumference that touches the road. Have you ever noticed the patterns, shapes, grooves, ribs, blocks, sipes, and voids? Commonly known as treads. Stunning. Works of scientific art. Truly, I plan to write an essay about procrastination, but the dog’s tongue needed to be separated from its hind quarters again. Without my intervention he would spin in circles like a semazen worn by a whirling dervish during the ceremonial sema dance. I plan to write an essay about procrastination. Would you settle for a sentence or two next week?
Procrastination is not about doing nothing. I can do nothing. It’s easy. Doing nothing requires no effort. Doing nothing is quite peaceful. However, procrastination is stressful because it involves doing everything except the one thing you are supposed to do.
The word procrastination comes from the Latin procrastinare, which literally means “to put off until tomorrow,” but any true procrastinator knows that “tomorrow” is a dangerously aggressive deadline. A more accurate translation for the modern procrastinating practitioner would be “to put off until the absolute final milliseconds of human capability, right when the cortisol levels are high enough to mimic four triple espresso shots.” Procrastination is a habit. It is an art form. It is a psychological dance, and a trait found throughout human civilization. For as long as humanity has had tasks to complete, humanity has found brilliant, complex, and deeply exhausting ways to avoid doing them.
The ancient Greek poet Hesiod wrote about procrastination around 700 BCE, when he explicitly warned his readers about its ills, “Do not put your work off till tomorrow and the day after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn.” Yet the kids of the Bronze Age were not paying heed. Nah. They enjoyed looking at their sandals to watch their toes wiggle while arguing with each other whether or not Zeus actually existed.
Have you ever dreaded a task so much that you organized your sock drawer by fabric density? Convincing yourself that this is a contribution to society if only more people would do the same. This is a convenient if not also tragic system of self-delusion. Ahh, procrastination.
I hear that the genius Leonardo da Vinci was also an artistic foot-dragger. Da Vinci was notorious for failing to finish his commissions on time. So frustrated by his procrastination that his patrons routinely threatened to sue him.
He took roughly four years to paint the Mona Lisa, occasionally touching it up, but mostly wandering off to study the flight patterns of dragonflies or design a rough prototype of a helicopter. He was hired by Duke Ludovico Sforza to paint The Last Supper on the refectory wall of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy. The Duke grew increasingly angry because Leo would stand in front of the mural for hours, stare blankly, paint a single brushstroke, and then leave for the day. He wasn’t lazy. His brain was just operating on the motif, “I will do it later.”
Look at the construction of the Sydney Opera House. It was supposed to take four years and cost $7 million. It ended up taking 14 years and costing $102 million. While that is technically a bureaucratic and engineering delay rather than pure procrastination, anyone who has ever managed a group project knows exactly what happened. Someone at the top kept saying, “We will figure out the roof tiles next week,” until “next week” became a whole decade.
One of my favorite Shakespearian characters is Hamlet. Hamlet also happens to be a world-class procrastinator. The entire plot of the play can be summarized as a young man trying to find reasons not to resolve his situation of avenging his father’s murder. Hamlet receives clear instructions from a literal ghost in Act I. But does he listen? Does he do what the ghost told him? Noooo. Instead he spends the next four acts pacing around the castle, staging amateur theater productions, picking fights with his girlfriend, lecturing his mother, and talking to a skull. He is the literary embodiment of a student who needs to write a term paper but decides to organize their desk, write a poem about the desk, and then complain that the desk has bad energy. “To be, or not to be: that is the question.” But for a procrastinator a better thought might be: “I should check my phone again.”
Here’s an author I’m fond of: Douglas Adams, the brilliant mind behind The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Unfortunately, he had a relationship with deadlines that challenged the publisher’s ability to not lose their voice screaming, “You’re late with your manuscript, again!” Adams famously wrote, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
Adams was legendary for his procrastinating delays. In 1984, Adams was roughly a year late delivering his manuscript for So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish. His editor, Sonny Mehta, from Pan Books in London, decided that desperate times called for desperate measures. So Mehta checked Adams into a suite at The Berkeley Hotel in London and stayed with Adams for three weeks to act as a physical guard and supervisor. Adams was kept isolated from the outside world and forced to focus. The editor ensured that Adams actually sat at his typewriter and worked, instead of finding distractions. The aggressive strategy worked. Adams got past his writer’s block, which was, in part, caused by his having grown tired of the Hitchhiker’s series. Under strict lockdown and reminders of the huge advance he was paid, Adams finally pushed through his procrastination and finished the draft.
Nowadays, we have found ways to lucratively monetize the art of procrastination. We live in an era where billions of dollars are spent to design apps specifically tailored to exploit our desire to avoid work.
In the mid-2020s, the “infinite scroll” of social media platforms has turned casual procrastination into an Olympic sport. You sit down at your computer at 9:00 a.m. with a clear goal: I am going to write the monthly Chit-Chat. You open a tab to look up a single fact. Suddenly, the algorithmic matrix takes over. By 11:45 AM, you are deep into a rabbit hole watching a 45-minute documentary about a guy in Vermont who builds luxury underground hotels for toads. You don’t own a toad. You don’t live in Vermont. But you are locked in, hypnotized, because your brain will accept any marginally interesting random piece of information as long as it isn’t the task you’re supposed to do.
Even our workplace has adapted to disguise procrastination. The rise of remote work-from-home birthed the advent of the “mouse jiggler.” It is a real tool available as physical hardware or computer software. It’s used to keep a computer awake and prevent it from showing an idle or “away” status, so an employee’s slacker status stays undetected while they are actually taking a two-hour nap or practicing the acoustic guitar. We have literally invented devices to pretend we are working, so we can procrastinate more effectively.
Tim Urban, is an American writer, blogger, and illustrator. You might enjoy his website, Wait But Why. He describes procrastination as a battle inside the brain among the Rational Decision Maker, the Instant Gratification Monkey, and the Panic Monster. For days or weeks, the Instant Gratification Monkey runs things. The monkey wants to look at memes, read Wikipedia articles about the history of the spork, play video games, and argue with strangers on social media. While The Rational Decision Maker screams in the corner “Come on! We’ve got work to do!” But the Rational Decision Maker is entirely ignored. But then, the night before the deadline, the Panic Monster wakes up.
The Panic Monster is a terrifying beast fueled by adrenaline, cold coffee, and the sudden realization that unemployment, academic failure, or a missed deadline is imminent. When the Panic Monster arrives, the Gratification Monkey scoots, and the human body undergoes a shocking transformation.
Suddenly, you become a hyper-efficient machine. You type 120 words per minute. Your eyes don’t blink. You synthesize complex data structures at a speed that would baffle NASA’s Katherine Johnson. You finish a two-week project in four hours of raw, unadulterated frenzy.
When you submit the work at 8:59 a.m. for a 9:00 a.m. deadline, you don’t feel pride. You feel like an exhausted ghost returning to a haunted house. You promise yourself, “I will never do this again. Next time, I will start early.”
But you won’t. You know you are lying to yourself. The next time a project is assigned, the Gratification Monkey will return, tire treads will need to be admired, and the cycle will begin anew. Procrastination is a flawed, stressful, and utterly absurd way to live — and humanity wouldn’t have it any other way.
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