Procrastination

by Jane B. Burka

  Keeping the Past Alive. However procrastination functions for you, to the extent that it keeps you in familiar patterns and reenacts your usual relations with other people, it mitigates the feeling of being separate. This procrastinating pattern keeps the past alive in the present.

  Dan, an appliance repairman, frequently gets into tangles with his supervisor, Marty. Marty complains that Dan doesn’t arrive at appointments on time, he doesn’t submit requisitions for replacement parts until he’s run out of his supply, and he turns in his weekly time sheets late, disrupting the accounting and payroll departments. Although Marty is unaware that he is being cast in a familiar role, Dan is very much at home when someone puts him in the doghouse. His mother used to get after him constantly for things like coming home late to dinner and keeping the whole family waiting, or leaving his laundry unwashed until he discovered that he hadn’t a single pair of clean underwear left. When Dan hears his supervisor roar, “This whole business doesn’t revolve around you, you know!” it plays a familiar tune for Dan, whose mother used to say, “You’re not the only one in this family!” As long as people currently in your life seem to echo people from your past, you don’t really ever separate from those early relationships.

  A Constant Companion. When you’re in the throes of delaying, facing unfinished projects, unresolved decisions, or unpaid bills, you probably carry the burden of procrastination with you wherever you go. If you do have some emancipated moments, the memory of your obligations can return to spoil your freedom in an instant.

  While procrastination can be a constant burden, it can also be a constant companion in your life, reminding you of all you have to do. In this way, it may keep you from feeling lonely or abandoned, since you are always accompanied by mental lists of projects that you neither complete nor let go. Even though you may feel plagued by all you carry, when you procrastinate, you never have to say “good-bye” to anything.

  Of course, there are better companions than your endless list of obligations. Get a dog. Make a friend. Keep a journal. Procrastination is a lousy companion: faithful, but as you know, quite a troublemaker.

  FEAR OF INTIMACY: TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

  People who fear separation derive great security from being close, close, close. In contrast, people who fear intimacy are more comfortable keeping their distance. They are alert to the possibility that someone might be moving in on them, crowding them, tugging at them, making demands of them. They rely on their radar system, constantly scanning their surroundings for signals of encroachment. Anxiety is activated as soon as someone appears on the edge of the radar screen, and they rapidly mobilize to retreat. Procrastination can be their means of escape.

  Give ’Em an Inch, They’ll Take a Mile. Some people believe that relationships will drain them. They fear that others will never be satisfied and will demand more and more, until they are eventually depleted.

  Wally was an auto mechanic who realized he was in the wrong job, but he put off looking for a new one. “If you’re in a job where you work with a lot of people, they start to expect things from you. They want to get to know you, find out about your life, go out after work. If I worked in a place like that, I’d be aggravated all the time. The guys here know to leave me alone, and that’s how I like it.”

  Of course, there were times when Wally was lonely and wished he were in a job he really liked; but the thought of having to “train” new people to keep their distance was so unappealing that Wally stayed in his familiar, if lonely, territory. He had the same reaction when he thought about inviting someone to his house. “If I invite somebody over for a beer,” said Wally, “he’ll stay too late. I’d never get him to leave.” Since Wally feels unable to state his limits, he becomes resentful when the other person inadvertently oversteps his unspoken boundaries.

  What’s Mine Is Yours—So What’s Left for Me? If you stopped procrastinating and actually finished something, you’d then have the pleasure of taking the credit for your accomplishment, right? Well, not necessarily. Some procrastinators expect that, at the culmination of all their hard work and effort, someone else will take the credit. We all know people like that. At a party, you may hear someone else telling your joke as if it’s an original. You may work for a boss who gets ideas from his employees but submits them to his manager as if they were his own. For some people, being robbed of their deserved credit is so painful and upsetting, they would rather procrastinate than give someone else the opportunity to steal what rightfully belongs to them. Because their sense of self is so intimately tied to their accomplishments, being robbed of the credit feels like being robbed of their identity.

  Procrastination can be used as a protection from having your interest appropriated by someone else. Anna had been unable to choose a career and described how she had become hesitant to reveal, even to herself, what she was really interested in. She remembered that she had once announced to her family that she wanted to take piano lessons. Suddenly, she found herself enrolled not only in piano lessons but also in sight-reading and music composition classes. She was flooded with books on music, classical CDs, and posters of famous pianists. “All I wanted was to learn to play the piano like my friends, and the next thing I knew I was caught up in a whirlwind of music that had nothing to do with me. Somehow the idea had captured my mother’s imagination, and she jumped in and took over. That taught me a lesson: when I want something, I have to keep it to myself.”

  Like Anna, some procrastinators unfortunately end up being so protective of their interests and accomplishments that they lose sight of what they actually want for themselves. If you are afraid that your interests, once made known to a predatory world, will be appropriated, you may go through life shut off from your true desires.

  The Second Time Around. Some people postpone getting involved in relationships because they have decided that they will not risk repeating bad experiences from the past. If you once had to stand by helplessly as your parents criticized, abandoned, ignored, or otherwise hurt each other, you may have concluded that settling down with someone is just asking for trouble. Maybe you have had your own painful relationships that left you scarred. So, you delay asking for dates, put off improving your appearance, avoid meeting new people, and shun activities that might lead to intimate involvements. Procrastination feels like an ally that protects you from getting hurt again.

  The Werewolf Within. There are those who worry about the kind of person they will turn into under the pressure of an intimate relationship. They worry that behind a Dr. Jekyll persona, there lurks a Mr. Hyde. You might reveal a dark side of your nature that most people don’t get close enough to observe. Perhaps, in an intimate relationship, you would be as demanding and judgmental of others as you are of yourself. You may worry that closeness could unleash a destructiveness, a “monster” that you otherwise keep under wraps. It may be hard to imagine that someone could accept your ugliest moments. Could anyone know what you’re really like on a long-term, day-by-day basis and still want to be around you? As long as you avoid getting involved in intimate relationships, you never have to find out.

  It’s Better Not to Love Than Lose. People who avoid intimate relationships may not let themselves know just how much they long for closeness. If they let themselves develop a close relationship, they might discover how emotionally needy they really are. They might open up their own Pandora’s box, and in it they would find a deep and powerful longing for emotional intimacy that would be overwhelming and insatiable.

  Deep down, they are hoping for the perfect relationship with a mate who will unconditionally accept every facet of their behavior. Yet they suspect the truth, that complete and total acceptance is impossible in any human relationship. So, rather than face the reality of imperfect relationships, they avoid them altogether. It may seem best to keep the box closed right from the start, and procrastination is their strategy for doing that.

  Whether your anxiety stems from a fear of separation or fear of intimacy, procrastinat
ion may be your way of maintaining the boundaries of your comfort zone. But relying on postponement and delay for your comfort does not address the more fundamental issue of how you approach relationships. All relationships involve issues of boundaries and intimacy that have to be worked out. You can approach these issues as opportunities for growth. Resolving differences can be a way to learn and stretch yourself, both as an individual and as a partner in a relationship. Procrastination may keep other people at the comfortable distance you feel you need, but it prevents you from growing as a person.

  You may find that it is possible to be both dependent and independent in a relationship—in fact, it is important to be both. What makes a good relationship reassuring is that it provides a reliable, safe place to obtain comfort. What makes it fulfilling is that it permits, indeed encourages, each person to develop and grow as a separate individual. A good relationship needs a balance.

  6

  Do You Know What Time (It) Is?

  “What time is it?”

  “The deadline is today?!”

  “I’m only fifteen minutes late; why are you so upset?”

  “I’m not wasting my life—my real life hasn’t started yet.”

  Sound familiar? The fears we have described are interwoven with the procrastinator’s relationship with time. Many procrastinators live within their own versions of the passage of time, and often, the procrastinator’s ideas about time do not match “clock time.” In Chapter 13, we’ll talk about some things you can do to improve your relationship with clock time. Here we want to look at the psychological and emotional experience of time, so you can better understand your own personal relationship with time and how that might play a role in your procrastination.

  On the surface, time seems to be something we can all agree on. In the present, it’s three o’clock; five minutes ago, it was 2:55; and five minutes from now, it will be 3:05. Sound obvious? Guess again.

  OBJECTIVE TIME AND SUBJECTIVE TIME1

  Philosophers and scientists have never been able to agree about the nature of time. Aristotle took a tree-falling-in-the-forest approach and wondered, would time exist if there were no one there to measure it? Newton believed that time was absolute and that it occurred whether anyone was around to notice it or not. Kant pointed out that, although we can’t perceive time directly, we do have an experience of time. Then came Einstein, for whom past, present, and future were all illusions. Most procrastinators would love for time to be an illusion, because time is what brings deadlines closer. However, illusion or not, whether we like it or not, time passes.

  The ancient Greeks referred to two aspects of time—chronos, or clock time, and kairos, a “time in between,” a moment outside of chronos time that is significant and meaningful. A similar distinction is made today. “Objective time” is measured by clock and calendar, inexorable and predictable: we all know that April 15 comes around every year; the movie starts at 7:15 and if you’re not there, you miss the beginning. And each birthday marks the passing of a calendar year that takes us farther from the beginning of life and brings us closer to the end of life.

  In contrast, we each have our own unique sense of time passing, which is not quantifiable or communally shared. This is “subjective time,” our experience of time outside of clock time. Sometimes we experience time passing swiftly; at other times it crawls ever so slowly. When you are engaged in your favorite activity, whether it be surfing the Internet, fixing your car, or luxuriating in bed before you get up, time passes so quickly that you can’t believe it. But when you are anxiously waiting for a return phone call or working on an assignment you don’t enjoy, the minutes feel like hours.

  Having a uniquely subjective sense of time can help you feel like a one-of-a-kind individual, honoring your internal clock and your body’s unique biorhythms, supporting the feeling of being a singular self among the masses. Subjective time might help you disengage from the linear view of hours and years to follow the rhythms of the natural world of seasons and cycles.2 Instead of feeling constricted by the constraints of clock time, you can breathe more freely in the elasticity of subjective time.

  A variation of subjective time, “event time,”3 refers to orienting your sense of time around the occurrence of an event. Sometimes, these events occur in nature, such as seasons, tides, floods, or storms (for example, before the hurricane versus after the hurricane). You are using event time when you think, “I’ll go to the meeting after I finish this memo”; “I’ll leave for the airport as soon as I’ve straightened the house”; “I’ll start studying after dinner.”

  The challenge for all of us is to integrate our own personal subjective time and our focus on event time with the inexorability of clock time. If we are lucky, we can move among them with relative seamless-ness. We can be engrossed in an activity, realize that it’s time to leave, and then mobilize ourselves to be on time for an appointment without feeling that we have compromised our integrity. Or we can track the approach of a long-term deadline, and even though it’s so far off in time that it doesn’t quite feel real, we start on the project anyway.

  Many procrastinators live with a profound conflict between subjective time and objective time, unwilling or unable to recognize that their version of time can be very different from clock time. Instead of moving easily and fluidly between subjective and objective time, they struggle. Some reject clock time as irrelevant, as though it were meant for lesser mortals. Some live in an eternal state of time confusion, going along as if they understand clock time and then suddenly feeling walloped by the shock of running out of time, only to repeat this experience again next time. Your subjective sense of time seems so much an integral part of who you are that it may be difficult to accept that it is a personal perspective rooted in your cultural or familial environment, your biological inheritance, and your personal psychology.

  Yet personal it is. In fact, your subjective sense of time may be confusing or aggravating to others, who have their own unique, and possibly very different, sense of time. A wife might ask her husband, “Why are you always on time for the softball game but late to the opera?” The husband might respond, “You get to the opera twenty minutes ahead of the curtain and think I’m late when I sit down in time for the overture!” A procrastinator rushing to the post office on the night of April 15 was asked why he was late mailing his taxes; he asserted, “It’s five minutes to midnight—I’m not late!”

  When two people relate differently to time—and to being “on time”—making plans can be maddening. “When I agree to leave the house at nine, I mean ‘nine-ish’ (which might mean “by nine-thirty or so”), and after all these years, my wife should understand that,” said an architect whose wife fumes at 9:05 when she has been ready and impatiently watching the clock since 8:45. Lenora grew up in Hawaii, where everyone jokes about being on “Hawaiian time,” but even there, people tacitly agree that, although being late is often expected, there are some times when it’s important to be prompt. Clearly, “on-time” and “late” are open to interpretation.

  It is a losing battle to try to get someone else to adopt your subjective sense of time, because everyone’s relationship to clock time is idiosyncratic. You might aim instead for a mutual understanding of your subjective differences and the possibility of arriving at compromises.

  We are all different in our subjective sense of time because many factors affect it. The biology of our brains influences how we perceive and process the passage of time. Scientists have discovered “clock genes”4 that operate on a cellular level throughout the body, regulating daily activities like sleeping and waking. The brain has many different clock genes, as well as a master clock that coordinates them.5 Clock genes lead some people to be effective morning people and others to be active night owls. Generally, our brains are pretty good at estimating the passage of time, but time perception can be distorted by changes in attention, emotional states, expectations, and context.6 People with ADD are not very good at estimating time inte
rvals.7 For them, time seems to pass more slowly, so they continually underestimate time intervals, hence their frequent lateness, characteristic impatience, and wish to move fast and faster.

  Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s extensive research on time perception has shown that people have different orientations to time that are based on past, present, or future.8 If you are locked into one primary time perspective, your view of life is biased and limited. Those who can maintain a balance among these three perspectives are likely to function better and enjoy life more fully.

  An example of an unbalanced perspective is de-emphasizing the future, which can create a problem for the present. Behavioral economists as well as social psychologists have observed that when an event or goal is far off in the future (such as funding your kids’ college education or creating an adequate retirement account for yourself), it seems almost unreal, and therefore it feels less important than it might actually be. By contrast, goals that are close in time (such as getting a big-screen TV for the weekend playoffs or doing your taxes on April 14) are experienced as more vivid or “salient.”9 So, even if the present goal (getting the TV) is less important than the long-term goal (saving for college or retirement), people are more likely to do what’s immediate rather than what’s important for the future. This is called “future discounting,”10 and it is a part of the human experience that makes procrastination so compelling.