Procrastination is a mental burden, a leaden ball tethered to an elastic chain. We often dedicate more energy to dreading a project than to actually doing it. Procrastination is a curse, but it is also a craft, a subtle form of creativity. Like any discipline (pole vaulting, rock climbing, or playing solitaire at work), procrastination involves diligence and skill as well as danger and risk.
Although this essay falls right near the middle of this book, it was one of the very last pieces to be produced. For two full years, I avoided sitting down to write about the delicious and distressing art of delay. While avoiding the task, however, I was actually working on it—indirectly. The subject was, I like to say, marinating. Although the outcomes of some tasks will reap no benefit from drawn-out waiting periods (sending a thank-you note or getting a mammogram), others, like writing an essay, can be nourished by a rich layer of mental dust.
The conscious act of avoiding a task keeps it vital in your mind, where it can swim about freely, unhindered by tangible action. This fruitful period is a stay of execution, the project’s last chance to live before falling under the ruthless knife of implementation.
The more distant the deadline, the longer you can procrastinate, but beware: as with a tart marinade, if you let the meat soak too long in the caustic juices of delay, the whole project could turn to mush. One of the great delusions of the procrastinator is the phrase “If only I had more time.” Given more time, most people will put off getting serious about their project that much longer. Often, the most creative work happens near the end, just as time is running out.
Procrastination’s dark sister is the deadline. Although some projects will succumb to inertia even under the threat of death, many will meet the mark seconds before the ax falls, frantic but complete. If people did not procrastinate, deadlines would not exist. The ying of delay requires the yang of lethal injection. The deadline holds addictive allure for countless creative people, who thrill at testing its limits, its pliability, and its truth. Could a six-month research study actually
be completed in two days? Is your client’s deadline a legitimate cut-off point or a mirage of her own making? What will happen if you’re late? Will you be humiliated at a staff meeting, get reassigned to a cubicle in southeast Siberia, or receive a new, more realistic deadline? I have often prided myself on completing an urgent task only to wait days, weeks, even months, for a response.
Nearly any self-help book about getting your disordered act together includes a section on to-do lists. (In fact, some such guides are organized as lists, such as Gina Trapani’s Life Hacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Life.) A list is a graphic tool that helps you visualize your priorities. Writing stuff down also helps prevent unfinished tasks from gnawing away at the edges of your mind. Externalizing information keeps it alive while keeping it at bay. The list can acquire a life of its own. I sometimes note a task that is already finished, simply for the reward of obliterating it with my fat black Sharpie.
A list is a database about your life. Such lists have become increasingly public, as groupware programs like Basecamp and Google Docs allow collaborative teams to track their to-do lists online—and view each other’s progress. Such tools make people’s ability to act (or failure to do so) transparent and visible.
Culturally, public lists function as a measure of accomplishment, a representation of personal taste and knowledge. Lists have flourished as a freestanding literary genre, as seen in John Hodgman’s farcical The Areas of My Expertise. Amazon’s Listmania tool lets users curate lists of books and other goods (and advertise Amazon products). Goodreads is a social website for sharing lists of what users are reading or hope to read. The productivity blog 43 Folders suggests warding off distractions by posting a Not-to-Do List over your desk (“Do not search for gray hairs” or “Do not post to your blog”).
Where do you keep your lists? And what about all the other notes, reminders, and occasional bolts of joy or genius that strike without warning throughout the day (“get butter,” “call dentist,” “pet a kitten,” “invent wind-powered SUV”)? People capture data with everything from BlackBerries to index cards to purpose-made stationery systems. Some of us put all our notes, no matter what the subject, in one place; this mental dumping ground can be anything from a giant searchable Word document to a hand-bound sketchbook. Others prefer to keep a different capture vehicle for each project—a separate slender Moleskine, for example, for “obsessions,” “obligations,” and “conquests.”
The following techniques for taming the clock and stoking creativity reflect a designer and writer’s perspective; they are useful for tackling dreaded tasks and duty-soaked schedules of any kind. EL
BURST CLEANING Working quickly in tiny slivers of time is a housekeeping technique that can be applied to creative work as well. In the ten-minute lull before your mother-in-law arrives for the weekend, you could wipe down your kitchen countertops, organize your junk mail, rid your medicine chests of commonly abused prescription drugs, and compose a haiku about dragonflies and melting snow.
CHUNKING Turn one big job into many small ones. If you have a grossly disordered closet, try starting with just a single category, such as “shoes,” “skeletons,” “stuff on the floor,” or “stuff that shouldn’t be in the closet anyway.” (Procrastinate on the rest until you’re ready to tackle the next chunk.) Similarly, a vast, vague task such as “achieve job satisfaction” becomes manageable when mercilessly hacked into little pieces, such as “send resume to Bob,” “stop sitting next to Fred,” and “blow whistle on Jane.”
TEA TIME Bach, Balzac, Kant, and Rousseau all did their best work on caffeine. Why can’t you? But even better than the new beginning delivered by a good cup are the things you can accomplish while the water is boiling: schedule a root canal, empty the dishwasher, or plot your escape from a loveless marriage.
MENTAL PENCIL SHARPENING When delaying work on a project, try a variety of rituals to prepare the ground for real action later on, such as gathering and digesting research materials, creating charts and diagrams, making relevant and irrelevant phone calls, sending relevant and irrelevant emails, and going shopping. (Nearly any project can be framed to justify a shopping excursion, also known as “research.”) When you finally sit down to do the job, the work will have already begun.
EXFOLIATE Moisturizers with retinol (the animal form of vitamin A) force your skin to turn cells over more quickly, revealing softer, firmer cells beneath. You can also exfoliate your closet (out with the old, in with the new), or your cabinets (discard those five-year-old bottles of whole cloves), and your writing (replace tawdry or timid words with sparkly new ones).
DO SOMETHING ELSE Go for a drive, or take a hike, or take a shower; maybe you’ll have better luck when you come back to the task later. Furthermore, the act of not doing one thing gives you time to do something else. No matter what project I am working on at any given moment (writing an essay or plotting a pyramid scheme), a corner of my brain is always worrying about something else that I should be doing instead (paying the bills or creating a scale replica of the Parthenon out of cookie dough.)
DON’T DO LUNCH Meetings are powerful time magnets that quickly mushroom into opportunities for procrastination. Lunch makes this problem worse. The so-called working lunch is generously padded with small talk and menu chatter. Keep your meetings short and focused. People tend to schedule meetings in one-hour time blocks, yet many useful discussions can take place in fifteen minutes or less. Participants are less likely to be late for a shorter meeting set for a specific time, such as 3:45.
LOCK YOURSELF IN A ROOM Chuck Berry wrote many of his greatest songs, including “No Place to Go,” during a two-year stint in prison.
LIGHTEN UP If you’re blocked on a project, remind yourself that “It’s just graphic design,” “It’s only a wedding,” or “I didn’t really want to go to med school that much anyway.”
GET SERIOUS If the blow-it-off approach doesn’t work for you, try a rain dance, pow-wow, or recommitment ceremony (to your editor, client, or your future).
TO SHOE OR NOT TO SHOE? It’s a tough call.
