Soon

by Andrew Santella

  Whenever I couldn’t bring myself to do what I knew I should be doing, I made to-do lists. For me, and I bet for most procrastinators, the whole point of the to-do list is that it enhances the satisfaction in blowing something off. If you didn’t first list the thing you are now putting off, you might not ever realize that you weren’t doing that thing. And where is the fun in that?

  I made lists of essays to be written, revisions to be completed, and e-mails to be sent or responded to. There were lists of magazine stories to be pitched and lists of editors to pitch them to. There were lists of bills to be paid, websites to be visited, errands to be run, laundry to be done, and depressed friends to be called and cheered up. By the end of a typical day, my workspace was like a library of lists. I left lists for myself on the desk, on the bed, and masking-taped to a cabinet.

  Sometimes I lost my lists and found them only later. This was no problem. Even my weeks-old lists were usually still uncompleted, and in that sense, still perfectly good. Old lists were welcomed back, like sheep that had strayed, to join the rest of the herd.

  It’s nice to think that lists could be a way of ordering our chaotic lives, but my list-making has never had much to do with getting things done. Just the opposite. I love lists because list-making itself feels like an achievement, and therefore relieves me of the responsibility of achieving whatever goals I have set for myself on my list.

  Making a list, managing a list, losing a list, then spending part of an afternoon looking for a lost list—these all take up some of the time that I might spend actually doing some of the things on that list. I suppose this is one of the reasons so many people are so addicted to to-do lists. The other is that making a list of things to be done is often more satisfying than actually doing the things on the list. Naming obligations is usually more fun than fulfilling them.

  * * *

  Wandering the Internet a while ago, ostensibly in the name of research, I came across a to-do list Johnny Cash is supposed to have at some point scrawled in a date book, under the heading “THINGS TO DO TODAY!”

  Not Smoke

  Kiss June

  Not Kiss anyone else

  Cough

  Pee

  Eat

  Not eat too much

  Worry

  Go See Mama

  Practice Piano

  For a long time I wondered if the exclamation mark in the heading indicated a sunny optimism that I would not have anticipated from the Man in Black. Or did it merely suggest desperation?

  But the item that really marks Cash as a genius among list makers is number 8: “Worry.” Can anyone ever really worry enough? And, having worried enough, wouldn’t one naturally start to worry that one has worried too much? Worry can never really be crossed off a list of things to do. It is a meta-ambition, an ambition entirely about itself and therefore one that can never be realized, because even having had it on one’s list is cause for worry. It’s dizzying, if you think about it long enough. It produces a kind of spiritual vertigo, a deep psychic discomfort that I think Cash must have known, because the item that follows “Worry” on his to-do list is “Go See Mama.”

  The greatest American list maker was Benjamin Franklin, who in the Pennsylvania Gazette of January 6, 1737, published a list of more than two hundred ways of saying that someone is drunk. (“He’s got his Topgallant Sails out,” for example.) Franklin is also credited with pioneering the use of lists of pros and cons as a decision-making tool. And when he was twenty, Franklin famously compiled a list of thirteen virtues (temperance, silence, order, etc.) to which he aspired. He meant for the list to function like a moral spreadsheet. He recorded his failings, marking “by a little black spot every fault I found by examination to have been committed” relating to each virtue. Franklin’s idea was to master each virtue in turn until he had completed the list and achieved perfect virtue. He would live another sixty-four years, but Franklin at twenty was already in a hurry to succeed. “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of,” he wrote. And, “Lost time is never found again.”

  The American self-help industry can trace its origins to Franklin. Scholars debate whether Franklin himself was entirely serious about some of the advice he published, or whether he might have been spoofing the sort of sober Puritan moralism that is the foundation of the American way of work. It’s easy to see why Franklin might be suspected of having some fun with his readers. He was enormously accomplished, a prolific inventor and writer, it’s true; but he also spent an awful lot of time lying around in bathtubs, sometimes with one of his French mistresses. He was not so obsessed with productivity that he didn’t know how to waste an afternoon.

  One twentieth-century example of the American list-making, note-jotting, high-achieving type is Dwight Eisenhower, the general who chain-smoked his way through the exhaustive and meticulous planning of the Normandy invasion, but is now better remembered as a president who spent an inordinate portion of his two terms in the White House golfing. Like Franklin, Eisenhower has become an icon of American productivity. His reputation in this area originates from a speech he gave at Northwestern University in the late 1950s, in which he quoted a “retired college president” about how to make the most of any allotted reserve of time: “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” Eisenhower was probably quoting himself; he had been president of Columbia University after the war. Ironically, his brusque, militarily efficient management style alienated much of the faculty there, who were more comfortable with endless and aimless committee discussions.

  But Eisenhower’s quote attracted the attention of the writer and educator Stephen Covey, who would develop the FranklinCovey productivity business. Covey made the quote the basis of what came to be called the Eisenhower Matrix. A decision maker is supposed to divvy up his to-do list into four categories: do now; decide when to do it; delegate it; and delete it. This was meant to be an improvement on the to-do list, with the budgeting of time eliminating the kind of dicking around that philosopher Mark Kingwell has called action-as-inaction—the inconsequential busyness that makes it possible for us to not do what the world thinks we should be doing. My own suspicion is that many of the people you admire as devoted parents or selfless Scout troop leaders are doing their admirable deeds, at least partly, to avoid doing something else—like, for example, their jobs.

  Most of us recognize that sometimes inaction can be a kind of action. The Symbolist poet Saint-Pol-Roux posted a notice on his bedroom door each night before going to bed: “Do not disturb. The poet is working.” That’s a little precious, but it nods toward our understanding that results come not just from constant effort, busyness, and motion, but also from repose, meditativeness, and receptivity.

  As a procrastinator, I know how to make this human need for inaction work for me. I let myself read one more book, listen to Coltrane, take a shower or a walk around the park, and it all gets filed under “writing.” As in, I know it looks like I’m lying here with a drink in my hand staring vacantly at the ceiling, but I’m really writing. At some point, you tell yourself, you will stop “writing” and start writing.

  So much of my procrastination begins with anxiety. I worry that a magazine piece I have been assigned is beyond my abilities, and so I put off work on it. I worry that some long-needed household repair will turn out to be even more complicated and more costly than I had thought, so I delay that, too. I worry that my doctor will find something wrong with me, something I’d really rather not think about, and so year after year, I put off seeing him. So many things to do, so many reasons to worry, so many lists.

  * * *

  In 1482 Leonardo da Vinci wrote to Ludovico Sforza, regent of Milan, looking for employment. Leonardo had a sense for what would matter most to the badass ruler of one of Italy’s warring city-states, so in his job letter he listed his many capabilities: construction of catapults and other siege weapons; design of portable bridges with which to “pursue
and at any time flee from the enemy”; Leonardo had even worked out plans for a “covered chariot,” a war vehicle that sounds a lot like a predecessor to a modern tank.

  It was only at the very end of the letter that Leonardo mentioned that he could paint.

  Leonardo’s pitch letter worked. But upon hiring him, Ludovico put him to work not on any military project, but on a massive bronze sculpture called the Gran Cavallo. A monument to the duke’s father, it was to be the world’s largest equestrian statue. Like so many other Leonardo projects, it never quite reached completion. The problem of casting such an enormous work in one piece may have stymied Leonardo; his work on it stalled for years. At some point Ludovico must have tired of waiting for its completion. When French troops threatened Milan, and the city’s defenders found themselves wanting firepower, Ludovico appropriated the bronze set aside for Leonardo’s horse for use in casting artillery.

  The cycle of ambitious promise and frustrating delay was standard operating procedure for Leonardo. He had a head full of ideas, but was constantly harried by noble folk wanting portraits. Leonardo was famous in his own time for making big plans, then never getting around to realizing them. He had his own agenda. He was constantly setting enormous tasks for himself, and he maintained a remarkably ambitious to-do list: “Describe how clouds are formed and how they dissolved” was one chore typical of those he listed. “Describe what sneezing is,” another. And like a lot of the contract workers I know, he seemed to not like saying no to new assignments, which may be why he left so many works unfinished. His first biographer, Giorgio Vasari, suggested that it was Leonardo’s perfectionism that got in the way: “He began many things [but] it appeared to him that the hand was not able to attain the perfection of art in executing the things which he imagined.” Pope Leo X, frustrated by Leonardo’s tardiness, is said to have declared, “This man will accomplish nothing.”

  Today we are amazed by Leonardo’s sketches for helicopters, submarines, and robots, but in his time his patrons mostly wanted to know when he would finally finish the portraits he had promised.

  Leonardo completed only twenty paintings in his lifetime, and two of those share the same name: The Virgin of the Rocks. This anomaly came about because in 1483 Milan’s Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception asked Leonardo to produce a painting of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child for an altarpiece in their chapel. With a naive optimism familiar to anyone who has ever made a living as a contract worker, Leonardo agreed to finish the project in seven months. It would be twenty-five years before Leonardo’s painting was installed.

  The delay has landed Leonardo on a lot of lists of history’s most famous procrastinators. Leonardo himself, late in his life, is said to have agonized over all he had left undone. But can his procrastination really be separated from his genius? We value him today as a polymath, a thinker who bounded from art to anatomy to astronomy to engineering, making important advances in each field. The failings that frustrated his contemporaries make him seem distracted and capricious. But isn’t it possible that a more workmanlike Leonardo, one who cared only about pleasing his patrons and meeting deadlines, would have done nothing worth remembering?

  That’s the kind of argument that appeals to procrastinators, providing cover for our tendency to delay. But the history is more complicated. Leonardo produced his painting for the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception with relative dispatch—only a couple of years late. But, insulted by the meager payment offered for the work, he held on to it to spite his patrons, then sold it to someone else. That painting, which never made it to the chapel, now hangs in the Louvre.

  Chastened, the Confraternity eventually made Leonardo a second offer, which he accepted, thus committing himself to a second go at the work. This one took him fifteen years to finish. (Or as one circumspect source put it, “Execution of the commission was protracted.”) This second version of The Virgin of the Rocks, which you can see at London’s National Gallery, if you can push your way through the crowds, finally fulfilled Leonardo’s contract with the Confraternity, who installed it behind the altar in 1508, a quarter century after Leonardo had promised to deliver it in seven months.

  * * *

  Procrastinators, according to the strictest definition of the term, choose to delay knowing that delaying will probably come back to bite them later. So if procrastination involves acting (or not acting) contrary to my own self-interest, the question that has to be asked is What sort of person acts against what he thinks is his own self-interest? The ancient Greeks (of course) had a word for this behavior. They called it akrasia: willfully acting against one’s better judgment. Socrates argued that genuinely akratic behavior was impossible because no one who fully understood what was best for him would fail to do what was best for him. “No one goes willingly toward the bad,” he argued.

  Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that akrasia accurately described a failure of the will. Appetites or passions overtake reason: I genuinely want to get in shape, but I don’t because, instead of exercising, I choose to watch Talladega Nights on Hulu and eat a pint of Häagen-Dazs salted caramel ice cream. So I get the pleasure of the pint of Häagen-Dazs, but forfeit the fitness. I didn’t do what I believed was best for me.

  Akratic behavior shouldn’t be all that hard to understand, given that we seem to be wired to satisfy certain animal appetites that may not be good for us—a night with the wrong person, a long afternoon at the corner tap, that pint of salted caramel ice cream. We know it’s not healthy, we know it’s not rational, but we do it anyway, and then we feel really bad about it. We think we’ve been less than human, as some of our idioms suggest: we’ve made a pig of ourselves, we say, or we’ve been complete asses. Maybe we get sick as a dog as a result. The sixteenth-century poet Edmund Spenser named the sorceress in The Faerie Queene Acrasia. She had the power to turn her lovers into animals. They couldn’t control themselves.

  It happens to the brightest of us. The Nobel Prize–winning economist George Akerlof wrote a 1991 paper called “Procrastination and Obedience” that begins with an anecdote about Akerlof’s continued failure, day after day, to send a package from India, where he was living, to the United States, where his friend and colleague Joseph Stiglitz was waiting for it. “Each morning for over eight months, I woke up and decided that the next morning would be the day to send the Stiglitz box,” Akerlof wrote. But each morning for over eight months, the box remained where it was.

  This is comforting, on one level: it’s nice to know that even brilliant scholars procrastinate. On the other hand, if you are the kind of person who is baffled by procrastination, you may want to shake Akerlof by the lapels: Just mail the damn box! Akerlof, too, was struck by the mystery. In procrastination, he saw evidence that our judgment and decision-making, contrary to the assumptions of classical economics, were ruled by impulses that were less than entirely rational. Akerlof’s field, behavioral economics, studies how real, occasionally irrational people make real, occasionally irrational decisions.

  One of the specific categories of irrationality mastered by procrastinators is what economists call hyperbolic discounting—the tendency to value immediate rewards (smaller ones that come sooner) over those we have to wait for (larger and later). Thus, a graduate student puts off working on a dissertation that will increase his chances of getting a decent job one day so that he can play another game of online Scrabble. He is favoring his present self over his future self. Let’s leave aside for now the possibility that the procrastinating grad student, by wasting time playing online Scrabble, is really articulating a lack of faith that the promised big payoff (a decent job) will ever be forthcoming.

  Procrastination is possible only in a world where choice is a paramount value, like our global consumerist swap-meet of an economy. The free market is supposed to be essential to human liberty, and choice one of our most treasured rights. But if you are like me and have ever spent long, agonized minutes in the cereal aisle of a supermarket, unable to pick between
Honey Smacks and Cap’n Crunch, you know that choice can also be a burden that weighs heavily.

  Doubt is a product of a choice. Should I accept this job? Should I paint my bedroom blue? Should I ask this person to marry me? Should I go see a doctor about this thing on my shoulder that won’t go away? I’m not sure; I can’t decide. I wake up, like Akerlof, knowing there are certain things I should do today. But which, exactly? A to-do list is a menu, and in the depths of procrastination, what I really want is for the waiter to tell me what to order.

  * * *

  Leonardo never finished his Gran Cavallo. He did manage a twenty-four-foot-tall clay model of the horse in 1493, but it was soon destroyed by archers who used it for target practice. After Sforza, under threat of invasion, repurposed Leonardo’s eighty tons of bronze as raw material for cannon shot, the plans for the enormous horse were forgotten for centuries. Leonardo’s design turned up again only when some of his old notebooks were uncovered in Madrid in 1965. An American art collector named Charles Dent read about the aborted project in an issue of National Geographic and decided to fund a second attempt. The sculptor he hired, Nina Akamu, finally completed a version of Leonardo’s monumental horse. It wasn’t exactly the monument Leonardo had designed, but it was twenty-five feet tall and weighed fifteen tons. It was unveiled in Milan in 1999, five hundred years after Leonardo’s clay model had been destroyed.

  I like to think of it as a monument to the procrastinator’s battle with himself. Be patient. Someone, somewhere, even if it is five hundred years after the fact, may finish the things you never got around to doing.

  5

  On the Clock

  We do not want any initiative. All we want of them is to obey the orders we give them, do what we say, and do it quick.