This is the book I have spent my whole life not writing.
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Procrastination is one of the oldest stories ever told. Whenever in the course of history there has been a job to be done, you could count on finding someone putting off doing it. Procrastination is a theme that bubbles to the surface again and again in literature, religion, economics, medicine, and military history.
Moses, who repeatedly tried to weasel out of the assignments Yahweh had for him, was certainly a procrastinator. The early Greek poet Hesiod, in The Works and Days, a poem from 800 b.c. that doubles as a primer in the agricultural arts, warned, “Do not put your work off till tomorrow and the day after, for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work.” Cicero, in an attack on his rival Mark Antony, warned that procrastination is “hateful,” especially in a warrior.
The New Testament is filled with admonitions to hurry up, and not put off the important stuff, like repentance. Even the saints have had trouble complying, though. Augustine of Hippo famously prayed for chastity, “but not yet.”
The Christian tradition’s antipathy to procrastination is rooted in the desire for eternal life—and the fear that if we put off salvation too long, untimely death will intervene and damn us to unending torment. Steeped as I was in this teaching throughout my Catholic boyhood, I am still plagued by the fear that failing to patch the tear in one of my window screens in a timely fashion might be counted as a mortal sin.
What I like about Augustine’s chastity prayer is the way it articulates my own ambivalence. Like all procrastinators, and like Augustine, I am always saying, “Not yet.” In Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Hamm is asked, “Do you believe in the life to come?” He answers, “Mine was always that.”
Even many dedicated procrastinators aren’t familiar with the history behind their habit. I don’t get this. Digging into procrastination’s long tradition can be an endlessly distracting effort, which makes it a useful way to avoid doing whatever it is you should be doing instead. Even better, it allows procrastinators to see themselves as upholders of a storied legacy, and not just as addled time-wasters. Cultivating these sorts of rationalizations is crucial to thriving as a procrastinator.
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So what’s our problem? Thinkers going back to Aristotle have wondered why individuals fail to do what they know is good for them. Why don’t we portion our time out wisely so that we accomplish all we are meant to in a timely fashion? Why don’t we order our lives rationally?
One answer is: it depends whom you ask. Different disciplines have different ways of trying to answer these questions. I have talked with psychologists and economists, priests and philosophers. Just about everyone has a unique way of understanding procrastination. I have had procrastination explained to me as a physical, a mental, and a cultural experience. I have heard it described as an expression of our genes, as a moral failing, as a weakness of willpower, as a symptom of anxiety or depression, or as the result of a cognitive system overtaxed by external stimuli.
Procrastination is notoriously difficult to define. Most dictionaries say that it means to delay or postpone some action. But most of us understand that procrastination also involves avoiding action because it is in some way onerous—like when I put off seeing my dentist because I dread the drill, or when a student starts a ten-page school essay at nine o’clock the night before it’s due. There are people who thrive on this sort of delay, and remain productive despite their procrastination. Some even want to argue that their delay feeds their productivity or that the deadline rush energizes them. But most psychologists who think about this for a living define procrastination as more than just delay. It is postponement undertaken despite expecting to be worse off for the delay. So if you think you have a good reason to put a task off, you’re not really procrastinating.
Procrastinating as much as I have, and thinking about procrastination as much as I have—and really, the thinking and the doing are often the same thing—I have learned to see it everywhere. The taxpayer sweating over Form 1040 late on April 15. The homeowner who has been meaning to paint the back porch for years now. The patient putting off the next doctor’s appointment. All different, but all procrastinators.
I belong to a tribe of independent workers—writers, editors, coders, graphic designers, tens of millions of us in the United States alone—each of us more or less free to do what we want with our time. So what do we choose to do? Just about anything but what we are supposed to be doing. Maybe we’ll go to an afternoon movie or sit around nursing an overpriced Americano. If we have to, we’ll even work out. Anything to put off a little longer the inevitability of having to make a living. This gig-economy temporizing comes with a price. Like many procrastinators, I am always alert to the things I haven’t gotten around to doing—the books not written, the Internet start-ups not started up. I’m always doing a kind of existential calculation, weighing what I do against what I might have done, or against what I have not yet done.
One reason procrastination is so reviled is that it can lead people off the path proscribed by whoever is in charge. The habit challenges authority, flouts the mandated way of doing things. It is no wonder procrastinators have always attracted powerful enemies. Churches spent a couple thousand years reminding everyone that delay would imperil the soul. Now, obsessed as we are with productivity, we worry about an even more terrible prospect: financial and social loserdom. Psychologists and life coaches and writers of advice books enforce behavioral norms and performance standards that only managers and HR departments could love. In this way, the enterprising efficiency prized in the workplace becomes the foundation of all self-improvement. Productivity is the operative gospel; to be a fully successful human, it is necessary to get things done.
If I had to make a list of things that I find admirable about procrastination, I would begin with this: I like that it seems to bother so many people. I’m for it because so many people are against it. In his 1932 essay, “In Praise of Idleness,” Bertrand Russell railed against “the cult of efficiency.” I, too, want to applaud procrastinators for their mutiny against the rule of clocks, and for their nonconformity amid all the methodical drones.
But then, I would say so, wouldn’t I? That is what procrastinators do—attempt to justify their delay with elaborate rationalizations. Procrastinate long enough and you get pretty skilled at this sort of excuse-making. Our talent for self-deception makes procrastination difficult to study, difficult to diagnose, difficult even to define. But thinking deeply about procrastination is worthwhile—and not just as a strategy to postpone real work. It is impossible to think about procrastination for very long without bumping into some fundamental questions: Are we ethically required to make the most of the time allotted to us? How do we reconcile our individual autonomy with our obligations to others and to the relentless demands of a never-ending workday? And, when seemingly all information and every entertainment is available, how do we distinguish between what is worthy of our attention and what is unworthy?
You don’t have to be a procrastinator to answer these questions. But it pays to stay alert to deferral’s tug, its psychic utility. Like any other compulsion, it lets me feel a simulacrum of control, for a while anyway, when I would otherwise be awash with anxiety. Never mind that the compulsion that helps us feel that sense of control might itself be contributing to the daily chaos that has us so frazzled. You have to reconcile yourself to some paradoxes if you are going to procrastinate. I love procrastinating and hate it; I feel guilty for doing it but am not all that eager to stop.
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Procrastinators want heroes. There is nothing I like better than hearing about another procrastinator’s shameful time-wasting. If that time-waster happens to be famous and accomplished, even better. To learn about a procrastinator who made it through the dark wood of evasion and delay and made it out the other end and still managed to achieve something: This is the really good stuff. These are the stories that allo
w the procrastinator to say, “See, it worked for them!” I have become a collector of these stories. They let me understand procrastination not just as a waste of time or as an affront to the prevailing social order or as a way to frustrate oneself (though it can be all those things), but also as a basic human impulse rooted in our native ambivalence and anxiety, and as a tool for navigating the everyday world of obligation. These stories confirm what you, too, may have suspected all along: that even the most wildly productive among us sometimes also manage to be procrastinators.
And why not? An unwavering, dronelike diligence may be great for bees, but not so much for people. There are so many reasons to put off doing something that I sometimes think that the universe must actively want me to procrastinate. Over the twenty minutes it takes me to run a midday errand, my various devices take turns pinging, chiming, buzzing in my pockets and my bags. I could check my phone, my tablet, my watch to see if there is some urgent message to be read—but that would just distract me from my errand, which is itself a distraction from the work I’m supposed to be doing. And who’s to say that my work isn’t a distraction from something vastly more important? Who’s to say that the daily scramble up the greased ramp of achievement isn’t itself a pitiable delusion, on scales both personal and societal? I like to think that it is—especially on days when I don’t want to work.
When I get home from my errand, I have the option to take a longer walk, a virtual one, up and down the South Island of New Zealand, let’s say, via satellite on Google Maps. Every hundred miles or so, when I need a rest, I’ll stop and zoom in on whatever pub or café I can find, then cruise around the premises from my satellite’s perch. It’s amazing how far you can go in an afternoon, and how quickly an afternoon can disappear.
Darwin didn’t have access to geospatial digital visualization, but I wonder about his daily walks all the same. He had laid out a sand and gravel path, one-fifth of a mile around his garden in Kent, lined by privet and hazel and holly, and he walked it every day, usually with a fox terrier or two. That was where he went to do his heavy thinking. But I wonder how much thinking he really got done there, what with the dogs underfoot and the kids running around, and the scenic views across meadows and rolling countryside. His kids liked to play cowboys and Indians in the woods along the path and to prank their father by stealing the stones he stacked to count each lap of his walking circuit. God knows how many extra hours Darwin spent circling the garden, like a plane waiting for clearance to land at Heathrow, because of his kids’ mischief. It’s probably a miracle he published at all.
Darwin loved Down House for what he called its “extreme quietness and rusticity.” There he could indulge his lifelong fondness for walking in the woods, but thanks to the growing British rail system and the Penny Post, he could also maintain a professional presence in London. Sometimes the connection remained too close for Darwin. His attitude toward the daily tsunami of correspondence the post brought him will be familiar to any present-day beleaguered e-mailer: he depended on it utterly and therefore resented it deeply. When the post one day failed to provide any letters to answer, he told his diary how grateful he was to be left alone for once.
Walking alone in some bosky dell had always been Darwin’s way of putting off the world and its demands on him. As a young man, pressed by his father to choose the ministry or medical school or some other proper career course, Darwin chose none of the above. Instead, he asked for a deferral. He told his father he needed “some time to consider,” then went on devoting himself to all the usual country sports of the English gentry—the triumvirate of hobbies his father derided as “shooting, dogs, and rat-catching.” At Cambridge, Darwin fell in with a “sporting set” devoted to hunting, riding, drinking, and “singing jolly songs.” No professional ambitions seemed to him worth missing the first day of partridge season.
Dithering about life’s big decisions has never earned anyone the world’s affections. Darwin’s father warned him that he might become a disgrace to the family. I have to wonder how much of Darwin’s foot-dragging can be read as plain contrariness, a stubborn determination to not give in to the world’s mandates. If procrastination has any virtues, one is certainly that it encourages us to think about why we are doing what we are doing (or not doing what we are not). When I put off the things I’m supposed to do, it is often because I’m wondering whether the things the world wants me to do are worth doing at all. Darwin might have been wondering something similar.
It wasn’t until he was invited to join the Beagle as a “scientific person” and companion to the captain that Darwin found the work that mattered to him. Later in life, after he had become a Great Man, Darwin wondered about the time he had spent putting off the various lives planned for him. He got to thinking about all the time he’d spent among the sporting toffs at Cambridge. “I know that I ought to feel ashamed of days and evenings thus spent,” he admitted. But, in fact, Darwin wasn’t ashamed. He had decided that he was, on the whole, okay with all the time consumed wondering what to do. He was okay with all the days devoted to jolly song with the sporting set.
Having had so long to think about it, Darwin said he would have done things no differently.
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Madness to Defer
Be wise today, ’tis madness to defer
Next day the fatal precedent will plead;
Thus on, till wisdom is pushed out of life:
Procrastination is the thief of time.
—Edward Young, The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality
Psychology’s war on procrastination began in the summer of 1933, or so one could argue, when a lonely nineteen-year-old named Albert Ellis kept trying to start conversations with women in the New York Botanical Garden.
Ellis is now remembered as one of the twentieth century’s most influential psychologists. But in 1933, he was just an anonymous business student with a debilitating fear of speaking to women. At the time, Ellis lived with his parents in the Bronx, not far from the garden, and he made a habit of sitting on benches there, wishing he had the nerve to approach any of the women he saw strolling among the roses. Ellis desperately wanted to meet these women, date them, maybe even marry one of them.
“But no matter how much I told myself the time was ripe to approach,” Ellis recounted in a paper he presented at a professional conference more than a half century later, “I soon copped out and walked away, cursing myself for my abysmal cowardice.”
Distraught, Ellis devised what he called “a homework assignment” for himself. He would go to the botanical garden every day in July, as long as it wasn’t raining, and whenever he saw a woman sitting on a park bench, he would sit on the same bench and give himself one minute to initiate a conversation. Ellis would allow himself no excuses, no evasions, no wiggle room.
“I was giving myself no time to procrastinate about trying, no time to ruminate and thereby to build up my worrying,” he wrote.
Ellis did it. He talked—or tried to—with 130 women in the botanical garden that summer. Thirty of them walked away immediately. But Ellis managed to start conversations with 100 of the women he approached. To his amazement, one actually agreed to go on a date with him—though she never showed up. Ellis nevertheless considered his experiment a success. He had learned that he could overcome his anxiety by confronting the very thing—talking to women—that paralyzed him. The experience changed Ellis’s life, “and in some ways changed the history of psychotherapy,” he later said.
Ellis was born in Pittsburgh in 1913 to an emotionally distant father who was often away on business and a mother he described as “a bustling chatterbox who never listened.” Ellis recalled that, to fill the void left by his parents’ inattention, he took charge of his two younger siblings, waking early with the help of an alarm clock he bought himself so that he could dress them for the day. Ellis’s image of himself was heroic.
He graduated from the City College of New York in 1934 with a bachelor’s degree i
n business, but after some failed efforts to publish fiction, earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Teachers College of Columbia University in 1947. Ellis’s career as a psychologist began conventionally enough by the standards of the time. He practiced in a classical psychoanalytic mode—listening to a couch-bound analysand recount dreams, fantasies, and free associations in an effort to access the unconscious roots of irrationality. But Ellis grew frustrated by his inability to produce results for his patients. Maybe more significantly, he seemed constitutionally unsuited to the long slog of therapy. So he began preaching a more dynamic, “highly active approach to problem-solving, rather than waiting for a miracle,” as he and co-author William Knaus wrote in the introduction to their 1977 book, Overcoming Procrastination. The approach Ellis used to cure himself of his fear of talking to women became a foundation of what he called rational emotive behavior therapy, a way of addressing the irrational beliefs that produce self-defeating behavior.
By the late 1950s, he was teaching his new methods to other therapists. Ellis’s timing was good; the world would soon be ready for an alternative to Freud. Psychoanalysis would become so suspect in the next several decades that the Nobel Prize–winning zoologist Peter Medawar spoke for many when he called it “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the 20th century.”
Ellis, always blunt, liked to say that “Freud was full of shit.” He had little use for years spent talking on a couch. Ellis’s prescription: “forgetting your god-awful past” and taking action. Neurosis, he said, was “a high-class word for whining.” People who wanted to plumb their childhood traumas were “big babies.”
As Ellis’s influence grew, his acolytes enthusiastically emulated his self-help assignments. For better or worse, some reenacted his botanical garden exercise, launching themselves at unsuspecting women in an attempt at achieving psychological wholeness—and maybe also getting a date. Pickup methodology aside, Ellis’s most enduring contribution may have been to inject a sense of urgency and action to the practice of psychology. Just as, at nineteen, he cured his shyness by giving himself “no time to ruminate and thereby to build up my worrying,” so throughout his career he cultivated an image as a robust, no-nonsense dynamo who prescribed action over talk, effort over contemplation.
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