In Procrastination Can We Find Solutions?

The hidden opportunity we could easily overlook…

I love a good quote to kick start an article, and perhaps I’ve found the perfect one below.

‘Procrastination is the grave in which opportunity is buried.’

I want you to think about that…the grave in which opportunity is buried.

Maybe if we could see, even for a few moments, a cookie trail of all our procrastinatory habits, there’s a good chance we’d pull our shameful socks up, and find ways to address some of our poor habits.

Procrastinating…intuitively we know we are doing it, putting things off because facing them head on is painful, and confronting, and our confidence tends to wane in anticipation of the outcomes, so we demur.

And despite the fact that eventually we are going to have take the bull by the horn and do whatever is worrying us, we still prevaricate, and elect to live in no-man’s-land, until we are without choice.

This poem, a sonnet, I wrote with regret about how, in one week, my time had literally disappeared, and so much writing was left undone.

I love the sonnet as a poetry style, old-fashioned as it is. It allows us to write plaintively, and it works for delivering a message.

‘A sonnet is a special form of poetry that takes its name from the Italian word sonetto, which means “little song” or “little sound.” Although English poet William Shakespeare is famous for his plays, he also wrote 154 sonnets (not including the ones that appear within his plays).

‘Sonnets are lyrical poems of 14 lines that follow a specific rhyming pattern. Sonnets usually feature two contrasting characters, events, beliefs or emotions. Poets use the sonnet form to examine the tension that exists between the two elements.’

In my poem, the element of regret is contrasted by the determination to start anew, with hope and determination for a better tomorrow.

The thing is, I recognize exactly why so much of my writing remains in limbo. And writing the sonnet was a way of confronting my malaise, and hopefully following through with a renewed energy for a more positive writing experience.

I attributed my despondency to suffering from a small does Shiny Object Syndrome. Don’t worry! It’s not contagious, but it can be the thief of time, especially for us writers who each day must embrace struggle, in order to finish work.

Shiny Object Syndrome is a lecherous companion, the bleak, malevolent pal who sidles up to the unwary, and ensures distraction, as opposed to focus.

Procrastination is all about putting things off that you know you need to do, and will have to do in the future, and hating yourself when you are consequently racing against time, still facing the same old, same old problem.

What’s worse is that often we are putting off something that is important, and we find ourselves doing menial tasks instead, feeding the dog, or checking out a historical event in Wikipedia, (the fountain of all things correct), or putting together a casserole for dinner, and suddenly tempus fugit!

I’m no different to any of you. My habits need changing at times. Facing confrontational issues, be it on a phone call, or an email, or even talking to difficult people directly, is an issue that is fraught. Some days I’d be happier to jump into shark-infested water, rather than face my demons. So instead of bracing myself and following through, I wear instead, a well-worn cloak of anxiety.

Makes sense doesn’t it!

NO IT DOES NOT!

In this TED talk, Tim Urban takes us on the hilarious journey of what happened when he kept putting off even starting his 90-page senior thesis paper, ‘a paper you’re supposed to spend a year on. And I knew for a paper like that, my normal work flow was not an option. It was way too big a project. So I planned things out, and I decided I kind of had to go something like this. This is how the year would go. So I’d start off light, and I’d bump it up in the middle months, and then at the end, I would kick it up into high gear just like a little staircase. How hard could it be to walk up the stairs? No big deal, right?’

What in fact happened, was that he kept putting things off until he had only a few days left, a few days and two sleepless nights, and so he worked through those night to complete his thesis.

Does this put a whole new stamp on the word thesis?

Eventually he got the call…from his superior, to congratulate him on a job well done!

See what you can achieve when you have to? A few nights of concentration, no sleep, and ‘poof’, it’s done, and you’ve saved yourself a whole year of work!

Except that it didn’t actually play out that well.

And I’m not going to steal Tim’s thunder, so I’ll leave you to listen to the TED talk to see what actually took place. The talk serves as a salutary lesson for all of us, for we have all been there, maybe not in such a confronting situation, but we have had the experience in some shape or form, and we cringe.

So how can we change?

One of the reasons that we cave into distraction is because often it gives us instant gratification…the cup of coffee we crave…nosing into what happening on Facebook for FOMO, (Fear Of Missing Out), or going for a run.

All these incidents are seemingly tiny, and yet their collective force can be catastrophic, so we have to find ways to fight the procrastinator demon.

I have struggled with the idea as to whether we need always to fight against following through with the procrastination fight.

In fact I wrote to this point yesterday, and thought about it overnight, and this morning came up with a totally different viewpoint regarding this seeming time waster.

In yet another Ted talk, lecturer Adam Grant talks about some of his students approaching him to invest in their company which was all about selling glasses (spectacles), online. That was their plan for earning their living.

He asked them a few curly questions about the business, decided they had no idea what they were doing, and in the end, chose not to invest in the business. The company is called Warby Parker.

‘They sell glasses online. They were recently recognized as the world’s most innovative company and valued at over a billion dollars. And now? My wife handles our investments. Why was I so wrong?’

Adams talks about procrastinators in life. He saw his students as procrastinators, people who could never get a show on the road. How wrong could he have been? He says:

‘So the first reason that I passed on Warby Parker was they were really slow getting off the ground. Now, you are all intimately familiar with the mind of a procrastinator. Well, I have a confession for you. I’m the opposite. I’m a precrastinator. Yes, that’s an actual term. You know that panic you feel a few hours before a big deadline when you haven’t done anything yet. I just feel that a few months ahead of time.’

When you’re a lecturer and one of your procrastinating students tells you that she gets her best ideas when she’s procrastinating, what do you do?

You get her to conduct a survey.

‘So I challenged her to get some data. She goes into a bunch of companies. She has people fill out surveys about how often they procrastinate. Then she gets their bosses to rate how creative and innovative they are. And sure enough, the precrastinators like me, who rush in and do everything early are rated as less creative than people who procrastinate moderately. So I want to know what happens to the chronic procrastinators. She was like, “I don’t know. They didn’t fill out my survey.”

The moral of this story is:

Never put off till tomorrow, what may be done the day after tomorrow, using the collective wisdom of the people who tried something similar yesterday.