One of these days we are going to see La Grotte des Demoiselles. This is an obscurely famous limestone cave in southern France, a big tourist attraction, which we drive past about once a year on the way to somewhere else. Every time we see the sign we say “One of these days…” and perhaps one of these days we will, and perhaps you will too. But probably not. The grotto may be a remarkable sight, but not remarkable enough to overcome the gap between intention and action, and to find a parking space.
Procrastination has saved us from a great deal of foolishness. As we get older the list of things we intend to do or see “one of these days” gets longer and longer. There are restaurants we intend to try, museums we mean explore, hundreds of serious books we should read, and several distant relatives we really ought to visit. It’s a kind of hope chest of future experiences, except that we rather hope that they can wait for a while, until the right moment comes.
My own talent for procrastination is above average. I can put off a medical appointment or a home repair job more or less indefinitely. The future for me is a convenient filing cabinet where all these good intentions can be carefully arranged, and then forgotten. When I was a kid, parents and teachers accused me of procrastination practically every day. This was fair enough, in so far as I always preferred to think about things for a while before actually doing them. Latin homework was a good example. Sometimes I would consider for days before deciding not to do it. That’s not indecision, and it’s certainly not laziness: that’s the brain doing its job and revealing that Latin homework is a waste of time. Procrastination is thinking in action, because a moment’s thought will reveal that most of the things we imagine we should do immediately can be done later or, better still, not at all.
The opposite of procrastination, as identified by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Cory Potts, is pre-crastination, or rushing into things without a thought because you just want to get them done. If Napoleon had put off invading Russia in 1812, or Hitler had hesitated before invading Poland in 1939, a vast amount of trouble would have been avoided. You may be able to think of other more recent political examples.
The procrastinator is relaxed, calm, because nothing needs to be done in a hurry. The precrastinator is anxious, fretful, full of worries about the future, and always trying to get ahead of time itself. American culture is future-oriented and therefore dead against procrastination. Everything must be done right now, or sooner. Procrastinators don’t really believe in the future until it arrives. When it does arrive it immediately becomes history, and therefore not worth worrying about.
Edward Young, the eighteenth century poet, coined the phrase: “Procrastination is the thief of time.” But that was then, this is now. We have so many things that we might do that procrastination is the only thing that saves us from drowning in trivia. We might have spent hours touring La Grotte des Demoiselles if we had ever stopped there, but we didn’t. That’s the beauty of procrastination. You never waste any time on pointless activities, because they are always there, waiting in the background of your life, and you know you will get around to them, “One of these days…”
