Technically it’s still Wednesday, so this still counts. It’s been meltingly hot here lately so I ended up sleeping most of the day to make up for not sleeping at night now that it has finally cooled down. Since it’s nearly midnight and I’m just getting around to doing today’s post, here is an ode to procrastination:
Procrastination is supposed to be a Bad Thing. It is supposed to get you into all sorts of Troubles and Predicaments. And yet, too many good things come out of procrastination for me to do more than manage it and glare at it when it doesn’t stay in its little corner of the room
Procrastination keeps me from worrying things to death. I used to get physically ill from stress (which had the positive of keeping me considerably skinnier than I am now, but the negative of sucking all joy from life along with my appetite). Now I allot a particular amount of time to something and no more. The problem is that I can’t work on something for two days, finish, and then have my deadline a week away. I have to leave myself two days before the deadline and then work on the project until the deadline. Frustratingly, life has a habit of delivering surprises that require a certain amount of unanticipated attention right around the time I’ve allotted for working on that project that I’ve been putting off and is due right away.
If I could manage to work on the same project for only two days, but do it long before the deadline then I would have that scheduling blip called real life licked. The problem is I’m a perfectionist and if I have seven days to do something that can be done in two days, I’ll spend seven days picking at it and wasting effort. Many people (notably those who don’t procrastinate) think that people who procrastinate are lazy. I think that there are a lot of reasons to procrastinate, but laziness isn’t one of them.
I put things off when I’m overwhelmed—not with things to do, but by the task itself. I put things off when I’m afraid—afraid I’ll screw it up, that it will be hard, that it won’t work, that I’ll fail. That’s the big one, right on the end there: I’m afraid I’ll fail. If I leave things until the last minute, I have an excuse. I could have succeeded, but I didn’t have enough time. This is somehow more acceptable than “I just couldn’t do it.” I have a report card from grade 5 that notes that I’m afraid to try new things or things that I don’t think I’ll be good at. I’m afraid to fail. Sounds to me like that’s something parents and teachers might want to nip in the bud, but the first I heard of it was on one of my trips home in my mid-twenties when I was going through a drawer of memorabilia.
And did I nip it in the bud? Well, it’s ten years later and I’m still going on about it, so lets just say it’s on my to do list.
(Note: Next week the blog is on auto-pilot as I will be on a beach somewhere. I’ll have some author-related links for you though, including an author’s reaction to those dreaded Amazon reviews and how to sign all those books and not get a sore hand.)
