National Procrastination Week started last Monday. It’s over now, so my comments may be a little late. But that’s the way it should be.
Procrastination is such a valuable habit. All my life I have put off doing difficult or unpleasant things, and I’m glad I did – or rather I’m glad I didn’t. For example, I’ve been intending to write a novel, get piano lessons, and learn the French subjunctive tense for over forty years, and I’m happy to say I have never done any of these things. The novel and the piano would have annoyed a lot of people, and the French subjunctive would never have done me any good at all.
Procrastination is usually deplored as a weakness, but in fact, it is a strength. Fools rush in where careful and thoughtful people fear to tread. 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 examples. The opposite of procrastination is precipitation, which my dictionary defines as: “Impulsive action, rush, or haste.”
Socrates was famous for inducing a kind of intellectual paralysis in his fellow Athenians by constantly asking questions, then questioning
the answers. What this technique reveals is simply that most of the knowledge we act on is incoherent nonsense, and most of our “informed decisions” are informed only by ignorance and wishful thinking. This persistent questioning could be irritating – in fact, it was so irritating for the citizens of Athens that they killed poor old Socrates just for forcing them to think again about things they thought were obvious.
Procrastination happens when the obvious is not obvious – in other words, when we are uncertain. We share this habit with the higher animals; just watch a cat trying to choose between two comfortable places to sleep. The cat is thinking about it. He may think about it for hours. Procrastination is a product of the fact that we think. It’s not strong or brave to rush into things without thought or hesitation; it’s stupid. This is especially true of big, dangerous things like double bacon cheeseburgers with fries, international wars, and marriage.
Some people seem to live in a perpetual hurry. True, there are a few things that do need to be done right now: cardiac resuscitation, flipping an omelet, and feeding the cat. Everything else can wait. Procrastination is not idleness. and it’s certainly not laziness: it’s the brain doing its job, sorting out the important from the unimportant. A moment’s thought will reveal that most of the things we imagine we should do immediately could be done later or, better still, not at all. It is an antidote to the furious, neurotic desire to do everything right now, whether it matters or not. Mark Twain gave us the golden rule: “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.”
National Procrastination Week has been and gone, so you’ve missed it. But it doesn’t matter. You don’t need a special week to put off all the tedious little tasks you don’t want to do and enjoy your life for a change. When it comes to procrastination, it’s never too late to start.
