Soon

by Andrew Santella

  Ellis’s approach was one of the progenitors of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), the predominant mode of psychological treatment practiced today. If at any time in the last couple decades you have sought help with insomnia, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, the inability to sustain relationships—whatever—you have likely taken a turn through the CBT workout. CBT aims to identify and eliminate the unproductive habits of thought that produce unhealthy behavior and self-destructive moods. It’s not hard to understand why the cognitive therapies pioneered by Ellis and others (such as Aaron Beck) became so popular. They offered a quicker, cheaper, less cerebral alternative to traditional psychotherapy, with its high fees, arcane methodologies, and seemingly endless rounds of talk. Where the old way demanded years of conversation about your childhood, your dreams, and your unspoken desires, the new therapies promised results with a course of workbook exercises and some highly structured meetings with a therapist.

  Practitioners of CBT like to describe it as “solution-oriented,” and there is indeed something briskly businesslike about all the lists, inventories, self-tests, and survey questions you find in a CBT workbook. It is a kind of therapy almost guaranteed to appeal to MBAs. It’s efficient.

  * * *

  Dig into the literature on procrastination and you’ll find references to a book by Paul Ringenbach called Procrastination Through the Ages: A Definitive History. You’ll have trouble finding the book itself, though. It never existed. Ringenbach’s bogus title was a publishing-industry inside joke, a hoax: no dawdling writer would ever get around to finishing a definitive history of procrastination.

  Nevertheless, in Overcoming Procrastination, Ellis and Knaus dismiss Ringenbach’s nonexistent book, as if they had considered it carefully: It is “an interesting survey, but it sheds little light on coping with the problem,” they write. Faulty bibliography aside, Ellis and Knaus were right to claim that there had been a dearth of books on “coping with the problem” before Overcoming Procrastination. But Overcoming would be the first of many volumes to follow that would declare war on the habit and offer strategies to defeat it. Despite its continuing influence, Overcoming has not aged well. It is peppered with jargon that deserves to be cataloged in a treasury of seventies-era pop psychology clichés. I’m not sure what the authors meant by “self-downing,” for example, but the phrase does evoke a certain time. And the authors have an odd and dispiriting habit of spelling out words to show emphasis: “you’d better spell life h-a-s-s-l-e” and “the process of change involves considerable work in developing more of a long-range hedonistic outlook. Yes, w-o-r-k!”

  In Overcoming, Ellis proposes homework assignments not unlike the one he gave himself to beat his fear of speaking to women: penalize yourself for procrastinating by promising to do something you don’t like to do (one example from the book suggests you send a $50 donation to the Klan every time you put off what you should be doing) or develop a system of rewards for not procrastinating as a way of conditioning yourself to “automatically” do the tasks you have been putting off. These strategies, and others like them, show up regularly in the psychological and economic literature of procrastination that would emerge in the following decades.

  Overcoming and its progeny tackle procrastination systematically, like a logistics problem. There is something beguiling, even irresistible, about such a methodical program. Who hasn’t dreamed the dream of self-actualization? Who hasn’t vowed to get serious, buckle down, set some goals, do some sit-ups? Most of us have accumulated and discarded our own small libraries of self-improvement. The urge is as natural as the need to procrastinate, its twin. But my problem has always been with the system itself, as manifested in CBT workbook exercises, self-tests, personal inventories, and statements of objectives. Take the workbooks, for starters: What adult wants to complete a workbook, suggesting as they do all the indignities of fourth-grade phonics? Workbooks are things to be used by preadolescents, names penciled at the top of the perforated-edge page in a graceless Palmer Method scribble. You hunch over your workbook in your molded one-piece desk-chair combo with the clamshell top that can be raised to briefly shield you from the teacher’s monitoring eye. But beyond a certain age—let us say, twelve?—one should no longer be required to complete workbooks.

  More to the point, the problem with too many systems of self-improvement is that they have no use for so much of the stuff that makes life such a precious mess: the ambiguities, the ruminating, the unrealized desires. For Ellis, procrastination was a failing, a deviation from a desired norm. For someone as invested in his own heroic self-conception, procrastination was intolerable. It was “abysmal cowardice.” The cognitive-behavioral playbook he helped develop attacks unwanted behaviors by challenging the beliefs and patterns of thought that produce them. The panicked flyer, the fear-frozen public speaker, the recalcitrant ditherer is asked: What evidence do you have to support your way of thinking? Might there be another way of thinking that would be more healthy? It’s all common sense. But as any procrastinator or panicked flyer will tell you, those patterns of thought are usually buried pretty deep, in a place where common sense doesn’t easily penetrate.

  * * *

  In retrospect, I can see that going to talk to Joe Ferrari about my love affair with procrastination was from the beginning fraught with difficulty, like scheduling an appointment with the family physician to discuss your plan to smoke an additional two packs a day.

  Ferrari is a professor at DePaul University in Chicago and might be the world’s most prolific writer and researcher on procrastination. Look in any bibliography on the topic and you’ll see his name over and over: Ferrari, J.

  Ferrari was one of the first people I called after I decided to write about procrastination. I had read an advice book he’d published, suggesting ways procrastinators could overcome their habit. I figured Ferrari could tell me how his discipline had become so invested in procrastination. He agreed to meet me on one of his visits to New York, and I told him I would pick him up at LaGuardia in my well-worn Corolla and drive him wherever he wanted to go. When I met him at the airport, he was carrying, under one arm, a copy of Max Engammare’s On Time, Punctuality, and Discipline in Early Modern Calvinism, which he presented to me. Accepting his gift, I wondered if Ferrari had noticed I had been a couple minutes late to Arrivals.

  Our plan was to drive to a diner in Woodside, a tidy neighborhood wedged between two cemeteries and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Even though he was the out-of-towner, Joe seemed more certain about the best route to take, so I followed his directions: where to turn, when to change lanes, how much farther. And when he wasn’t guiding me through Queens, he was sharing his store of knowledge about procrastinators.

  “I call them procs,” he told me between directions. “They are often very smart people. They have to be, to keep coming up with their plausible excuses.”

  Ferrari has been writing and talking and teaching about procrastination so frequently and for so long that he has developed an understandably proprietary view of the field. I came to like Joe and admire his enthusiasm for his topic, but I sometimes had the feeling during that first meeting that he took anyone’s procrastination, especially mine, as a personal affront.

  Ferrari became interested in procrastination while he was a graduate student in psychology at Adelphi University in New York in the 1980s. During a classroom discussion of self-defeating behaviors, he asked one of his professors if anyone had ever studied procrastination as a self-handicapping strategy. The professor directed Ferrari to the library to find out for himself. What Ferrari found surprised him.

  “There was nothing,” Joe told me. “What little I found was about writer’s block, that sort of thing.” Figuring he could have the field largely to himself, Ferrari made procrastination and self-handicapping his area of study. Self-handicapping, he explained to me, refers to the ways people defeat themselves—maybe because they are afraid to fail or because they are afraid to succeed at whatever task is at
hand. Self-handicapping procrastinators might postpone work on projects that they believe are beyond their capabilities. It’s not just fear of the projects that paralyzes them. It’s that their procrastination protects them from failure. Should they fail, it will be because they didn’t really try, because they waited until the last minute, because they said, “Screw this.” Their procrastination excuses their failure, even as it contributes to it.

  “This is one way people protect themselves from their anxieties,” Ferrari told me. “The chronic procrastinator would rather have other people think he lacks effort than that he lacks ability.”

  Procs turned out to be worthy subjects for research. But when Ferrari began presenting his first papers on the topic at academic conferences, he was disappointed to find that procrastination wasn’t always taken seriously as a topic of study. He heard the same lame jokes again and again about his chosen subject. At one conference, an organizer told Ferrari that his presentation would have to wait until the very end, “because, you know, it’s on procrastination.” Even today, Ferrari is reluctant to tell someone he has just met—say the person in the neighboring seat on a cross-country flight—that he researches procrastination. He doesn’t want to hear the one-liners, the riddles. (“Heard the one about the procrastinator? I’ll tell you later . . .”) He told me about hearing some ersatz life coach on the radio joking about procrastination and its discontents. Joe was not amused.

  “It’s not funny and it’s not helpful,” he said. “You should see the e-mails I get. People are suffering because of this habit. It causes real harm.”

  Ferrari has worked for more than a quarter century to help make procrastination studies a respected and respectable research field. He has seen it mature as an academic subdiscipline. He was at the head of a new wave of academic researchers who added social-scientific data to the clinical observations of practitioners like Ellis. In 1999 Ferrari attended the first of what would become biannual international meetings of procrastination researchers. At that first meeting, in Germany, 12 academics showed up. The 2015 meeting, also in Germany, attracted 180 procrastination researchers.

  The field has grown to include not just psychologists, but neuroscientists, geneticists, and behavioral economists. A 2011 study by Laura Rabin of Brooklyn College took a neuropsychological approach to procrastination, finding a correlation between procrastination and failures of executive function, the planning and self-control processes centered in the brain’s frontal lobe. Fuschia Sirois of the University of Sheffield has considered procrastination as a risk factor for general health and well-being. A 2014 study by researchers from the University of Colorado found that procrastination and impulsivity are genetically linked, and that the tendency to procrastinate can be passed from one generation to the next. Like any self-respecting academic field, it has spawned feuds and controversies. If you want to start a heated argument among a group of procrastination researchers, ask whether chronic deferral has more to do with our inability to manage time or with a failure to regulate our emotions.

  Ferrari comes down on the side of the latter. “Telling a chronic procrastinator to ‘just do it’ is like telling a depressed person, ‘Hey, c’mon, cheer up!’”

  To understand procrastination, he says, you have to look not at the procrastinator’s environment but inside the procrastinator. When you do, he argues, you see that procrastination is rooted in unmanaged moods and emotions. People delay because they think they have to be in the right mood to get something done. They convince themselves that their mood will change in the future, so the future would be a more suitable time to act. Our delay is rooted in our attempt to manage our moods and to fit them to the tasks we face: If I take a nap now, I’ll be able to focus better later. Tweeting now will help me warm up for the writing to follow.

  Again and again in his work, Ferrari has explored ways that procrastination can be deployed as a way to deal with our anxieties or protect ourselves from feared outcomes. The problem is that the procrastinator’s attempt at self-defense usually turns out to be perversely self-defeating. A study by Ferrari and Diane Tice showed that college students were more likely to put off preparing for a test when they were told that it was a meaningful evaluation of their abilities than when they were told the same test was meaningless and being taken only for fun. That is, when the test counted, procrastinators procrastinated; when it didn’t, they acted like nonprocrastinators. Only when their efforts mattered did the procrastinators bother to subvert their own efforts. The more that was at stake, the more desperately procrastinators needed to protect themselves, paradoxically, by not trying too hard.

  I recognized the rationalization from my own life. It made sense to see the habit as rooted in moods, anxiety, or depression. I had scribbled in my notebook a line from an essay by the writer Robert Hanks that had impressed me: “I put things off because much of the time I’m frightened and sad.”

  Reading Ferrari led me to the work of another academic psychologist, Timothy Pychyl, who has suggested that instead of letting mood dictate behavior, procrastinators would do better to remember that behavior shapes mood. Doing the thing you have been trying to put off doing will make you feel better. In fact, it is about the only thing that will make you feel better. The problem, I knew too well, is that it is also probably the one thing you can’t imagine doing.

  Here’s how it would go for me: Having sat down at my desk to write, I would decide that what was really necessary was a new pot of coffee. The coffee-making would require a trip to the kitchen. Once in the kitchen, I couldn’t help but notice the burned-out lightbulb over the counter. Replacing the lightbulb would require a trip to the corner shop. No way could I walk to the corner to get a new lightbulb, though; I had writing to do. On the other hand, the store was next to a really outstanding bagel place, and what with the coffee being made, it would be hard to argue with the need for bagels. Also, on the same block as the corner shop and bagel place was the bookstore where I could spend a little time browsing among the anthologies. It might even be inspiring.

  Even as I lead myself down this mental cul-de-sac, I am aware of the self-deception that I am practicing. Not that it matters. Work is the one thing that will set me right. Work is also, at times, the one thing I would do anything to avoid.

  * * *

  One of the most influential studies about self-handicapping doesn’t have to do with procrastination at all. In a 1978 paper called “Control of Attributions About the Self Through Self-Handicapping Strategies: The Appeal of Alcohol and Underachievement,” Edward Jones and Steven Berglas argued that some misuse of alcohol could be understood as an attempt to save face by exploiting drinking as an excuse for failure. “By finding or creating impediments that make good performance less likely, the strategist nicely protects his (or her) sense of self-competence,” they wrote.

  Berglas understood the impulse from personal experience, he said; he himself first experimented with drugs in high school just before taking the SAT, a test on which he was expected to get a perfect score. The drug-taking became an excuse, a way to lower the freighted expectations without compromising his sense of himself as intelligent. His pre-SAT high provided the seed for the theory.

  Procrastinators employ the same strategy: we protect our sense of our own competence by making it very, very hard for ourselves to succeed. It’s just one example of the twisted logic of procrastination. You have to marvel at all the many reasons you can find to procrastinate.

  Maybe I do because I am a perfectionist afraid of falling short of my own high expectations for myself.

  Or I am an excuse-maker who delays so as to give myself an explanation for the failure I am sure will come.

  Or I have a very public task to perform and I procrastinate because I fear the evaluation of others.

  Or I resent having to answer to my boss or my spouse or the credit card company or some other authority that expects something of me by a certain date.

  Or I get off on the adrenaline rus
h that comes with trying to do things at the last moment.

  Or I am overwhelmed by the size and number of jobs to be done.

  Or I simply find doing what I am supposed to do a huge pain in the ass.

  And to make things more complicated, I could be the most conscientious person in the world about, say, meeting my professional obligations, but a perennial laggard about household tasks. One of my pet theories—or to put it another way, one of my self-justifying rationalizations—is that procrastination can feel like a necessary ritual, a passage to be endured on the way to accomplishment. Like any ritual, it appeals to us as a way of controlling, in some small way, a life that can feel chaotic and unmanageable.

  In fact, what I noticed was that just about all the explanations I encountered made some kind of sense to me. A psychologist named Piers Steel staked out a position that emphasized our collective predilection for the present, not our inability to regulate mood, as key to procrastination. “It is largely because we view the present in concrete terms and the future abstractly that we procrastinate” was the sentence that I had underlined in his book. This too made a certain sense to me. Just about all of the theories made some sense. Even the theories that directly contradicted other sensible theories still somehow made sense to me. To read the literature is to recognize myself in so many, many diagnoses.

  And still I kept putting things off.

  * * *

  One morning not long ago, I reached, half-awake, for my laptop, as I usually do. Waiting for me online was some algorithm’s idea of a joke: a link to an article explicating the eight habits of highly productive people. I closed the clamshell and I went back to my pillow, face-first. I never did read the article, but I would bet that rolling over and going back to sleep was not one of the recommended habits.