On Putting Things Off

I'm very passionate about the problem of procrastination, having suffered terribly from it all my life. For some people it's a relatively minor thing, but for others it's debilitating– ruining educations, careers, relationships.

What has been blowing my mind lately– and I'm always doing all the reading and experimentation I can about this– is how much of this is PHYSICAL. Hanks talks about headaches and stomach disorders– for me, it's always been anxiety and loss of appetite. Which leads to low/volatile blood sugar, which leads to mental fogginess, inaction, and worsens the cycle of procrastination.

If I could go back in time to my teenage days and change one thing, it wouldn't be scheduling, prioritization, visualization, environment-management, monotasking, and breaking down tasks into little chunks. (Though all of those things are very helpful.)

It would be to eat a hearty breakfast every morning. I'm thoroughly convinced on hindsight that it makes the biggest difference. You need a clear mind to do all of the hard, messy work of dealing with reality, and to have a clear mind you need to eat, hydrate, sleep and exercise.

“It seems to me that Hughes wanted to be a writer more than he wanted to write; the difference isn’t always obvious, even to the person doing the wanting, and talent, which you feel ought to be a clue, may be a red herring.”

Wow, that sounds like me and research!

“Some see procrastination as a rational preference: the procrastinator has chosen immediate over deferred gratification, pleasure over work. But generally the failure to work goes along with a failure of appetites: a lot of the time I’m chained to my desk as a ghost is chained to the spot they haunt. It doesn’t even have the glamour of writer’s block.”

So much this—instead of working hard during the day then doing something fun in the evening, one procrastinates all day doing half-fun things (like reading low-brow internet news sources, ahem), then spends the evening wallowing in self-flagellating guilt, and angst, since the deadline slowly comes ever closer! How to break the cycle? The next time i write a paper, my time management will be better, i promise! The next review will be in on time, really! Who is being deluded? The habit must change. That sounds like the self-flagellation phase, cue the coda!

"Reading as a way of putting off thinking; thinking as a way of putting off feeling."

Poetic ending.

The article is written with great humility and self-effacing humour and is a confession of Robert's battle with a condition we all suffer from: a universally human problem of procrastination. That alone makes this writing magnanimous.

There is so much humanity and compassion in Robert Hanks's appreciation of this aspect of his life - and ours. We all wish we could say that's cure enough though! Self-forgiveness & confessions aren't going to fix the problem of chronic procrastination ... but what they do is make us feel better. And that's always a start. Feeling better is Stage 1 of fixing any of our problems. Starting to fix the real thing, like making lists and ticking things off and doing Coveyian shit is always going to be Stage 2.

I put off lots too, but I think I am more like Bartleby. There is just an endless array of stupid, boring shit that I do not feel like doing. And it doesn't matter how hard I try to screw up the gumption to power through tedious shit - I really would prefer not to. I suppose on some level I feel that it is wasted time either way, so, might as well enjoy wasting it in some modicum of comfort.