To Deal With Procrastination

Or Not To Deal

I'm a procrastinator.

I admit it.

I don't even have an excuse. No ADHD, no fear of rejection, I don't chase perfection, no depression or anything like that. I'm not even procrastinating by doing other tasks like cleaning or paying bills or calling my mom. Although I do, at times, fall into the trap of perfecting pipelines in order to soon be productive. No, it's not like that. I just don't do what I'm supposed to do no matter how much I break up my todo list in tiny 5 minute parts, set Pomodoro timers, or any other of the thousand hacks copy-pasted around the numerous lists published on places like Medium. Though I did manage to write this post about not doing anything. But I’ll get back to that.

The problem is I'm too good at accepting my own limitations and faults.

In my early twenties, while studying architecture and design, I had major problems getting out of bed. Not waking up, just getting out of bed. I would lay there staring at the roof, and debate with myself how long I could stay tucked in. How many minutes could I shave off from my morning routine? All of them it turns out.

And then some. Many times I’d realize that I cut it too close and that I wouldn’t make it on time anyway. No point in showing up late now is it? Before I knew it I would calculate how much time I needed to get ready for the second class. Until it was 4pm and there were no more classes to discuss. Finally, I would get up because nature has a way of forcing us at times. I was quite harsh with myself during these mental debates. "Why can't I just put my feet on the ground and go?", "I just need to draw that thing today, no problem!", "What's the point of all this anyway?", “I’m useless”, and so on. If you're a procrastinator, I'm sure you've had similar debates going on, courtroom drama style, with you playing all the parts. I'm a good lawyer though. There's always some defense, some witty comeback that justifies my own uselessness. My favorite was accepting that I'm not going to school today, so I might as well do something I want to do instead of laying in bed and mope (that'd be playing computer games more often than not). It's a preferable strategy is it not?

If defeat is assured, accept it and move on. I got so good at it that I started waking up at 7am, telling myself that I'm not doing anything today anyway so might as well get the most out of it. Giving up the fight before even having it got me out of bed early. Ironic, huh. These days I get to work on time (time being relative helps), but that doesn't mean I'm productive once there. Yesterday, I got to work, looked at my infinity list (that's my todo list, btw.), and managed three items. Sounds good? It took perhaps 20 minutes in total, divided over 8 hours. There's a pattern to the madness. I choose one item (e.g. send these forms there), prepare the task (find the forms and the place where they need to go), get coffee (need to have a hot cup of joe for filling out forms), browse Reddit (coffee is for breaks), play some Go (it comes after Reddit, but it's quick), read something interesting I found on Reddit or other feed (it's kinda like work; as a scientist I can justify almost anything as research), go to the bathroom (too much coffee), and then look at the forms again. But by now lunch is approaching, or a colleague dropped by and we're having a good discussion about something I can justify as work related. After a whole day of this, I leave the office feeling like a mouth breather. Given that my Medium writing tend to be about stuff like Zen Buddhism, vague self-improvement shit, and the problems of society, among other topics, there's plenty of material for the prosecution to work with. But, I've gotten good at jumping straight to the verdict, or even to the end of the sentence!

Each moment, as Sam Harris notes in a recent podcast episode, is a chance to start afresh. Blank slates.

This moment is all there is so might as well enjoy it! Some days though, the mental cacophony is deafening. Those days I have to do the time. Luckily, I'm past the endless rounds of beating myself up in my mental octagon. Serving time is in the form of spinning ideas into items on my infinity list. Future short-story pitches, setting up perfect workflows, scientific opinion papers, answers to the great debates in my field to be blasted on Twitter, and so on. "Productive thinking" I call it. It's not. What it is is too much consumption and too little production.

It’s like a dam with blocked drainage pipes, filling up until it's threatening to overflow.

Here's my three ways of handling that amount of water:

1. Churn the water around until I'm exhausted by thinking. Sometimes I find gold in those murky depths, but mostly I'm searching for that one true answer to everything. If I had that, I would no longer procrastinate. It's a delusion. I know. But, eventually the water evaporates.
2. In my clearer moments, I recognize that I'm trapped in mode #1 and say fuck it. The universe is reborn every goddamn moment, and destroyed every goddamn moment. The dam and the water is all an illusion anyway. I'll enjoy the fuck out of it. Press restart, cue the music, and start dancing.
3. Sometimes though, I don't want to let myself off the hook so easily. There's this feeling that if the pressure builds enough, the dam will break and productivity will flood out. Sometimes it does, like with this post.

How can all this be useful for you? I don't know. What I do know is that suffering (especially in this case) is a choice. You can acknowledge that no amount of punishment you inflict on yourself will actually help. But you can open your eyes to this very moment and say,

“I'm not doing anything anyway so might as well let it be.” That sounds very much like procrastination though;

“We have a brain that is selected for preferring immediate reward. Procrastination is the present self saying I would rather feel good now. So we delay engagement even though it’s going to bite us on the butt.”

— Dr Tim Pychyl, Author & Psychologist.

So, I say (or The Beatles said), let it be (words of wisdom), and give yourself a break because you’re taking a break anyway.