The cultural differences in the way people experience and value time can lead to confusion and misunderstanding when it comes to time management and time agreements between people. Some studies suggest that Americans focus on the now, on youth, on doing the most in the least amount of time, and on being prompt. Asian cultures, by contrast, have a much broader time perspective that takes into account history and tradition as well as long-term future planning. In some European countries like France, Spain, and Italy, being “late” is more acceptable and not typically experienced as an offense, the way it is in the United States.11 In Middle Eastern, African, and Hispanic cultures, people tend to experience time as flexible, fluctuating, and spontaneous. They expect to be involved in multiple activities and transactions at the same time and don’t feel a need to keep precise time commitments.12
No matter what our culturally influenced experience of time is, we all have to grapple with the interweaving of our private experience of time and the public time that connects us to the rest of the world. Refusing to accept clock time and insisting on following only your subjective sense of time separates you from everyone else and can lead you to procrastinate or to be late. One function of procrastinating—doing things in your own way on your own schedule, feeling in charge of your own time no matter the consequences—is to create an illusion of omnipotence over time,13 over others, and over reality. But like it or not, you, too, are subject to the rules of time, to loss and limitations, to transience and mortality.
The fantasy of omnipotence (and it is a fantasy) is something that we all hold as very young children and that we all have to deal with in later developmental stages, as we are confronted with evidence of our limited power. If life is kind to us, we are helped gradually and gently to acknowledge and accept our limitations, understanding that our humanity does not diminish our value or make us less lovable.
THE EVOLUTION OF A TIME SENSE
The subjective sense of time develops and changes as we go through life.14 Let’s look at these developments and consider how they might relate to your procrastination. Your relationship to time in the present may be characterized by time perception that was developed at an earlier stage of life.
Infant Time
For infants, life is lived totally in the present moment, and time is purely subjective. It doesn’t matter if the clock says 2:00 A.M., “I’m hungry NOW!” To an infant, “time” means the interval between feeling a need and having that need satisfied. Infants can’t bear pain for very long, and if satisfaction doesn’t come soon enough, they become desperate: survival is at stake.
When fear and anxiety are inevitably encountered in later life, a person responding in infant time will experience these feelings as intolerable and unending, instead of as normal feelings that come and go. Procrastination helps people escape from unbearable discomfort and emotional pain in the moment, such as the humiliation of not being good at something and feeling stupid, the crushing disappointment of a poor first attempt, the empty isolation of working alone at the computer. Instead of sticking it out, you find ways to exercise a level of control that was not available to a dependent infant. Off to the movies! Computer solitaire! Raid the refrigerator! Text message a friend! Plug into your music! Even though procrastination may lead to painful consequences in the future, at these moments, thinking about consequences is about as irrelevant as tomorrow’s breakfast is to a hungry baby tonight.
Toddler Time
Children gradually learn the meaning of past, present, and future. Although they’re hungry now, they will have something good to eat in a few minutes. Though toddlers live primarily in subjective time, they begin to bump up against parent time. Parents might insist on immediate cooperation—“Stop that right now and come here this minute!” or they may gently ease the child out of his timeless state with reminders that playtime will end soon. Parents want toddlers to do things all the time, often on parent time; toddlers quickly learn they can wield great power by refusing to cooperate.
The child may view the clock as an enemy trying to control him or as an ally providing reliability and structure. Since the parents’ messages about time are embedded within the whole parent-child relationship, it’s not really time that creates those attitudes; it’s the quality of the relationship that does so.15 Later, when procrastination feels like a battle against being controlled by time, it may actually reflect an ongoing struggle against feeling controlled by others. Fighting against objective time may represent an ongoing resistance to parent time.
Child Time
At about age seven, children learn how to “tell time,” recognizing that the relationship between the numbers on a clock reflect intervals of time passing. They are also confronted with more rules and expectations from the outside world. Teachers have schedules, schoolwork has deadlines, and parents expect kids to clean their rooms and help with chores before playing with friends. For children who are already sensitive to issues of power and control, time can be an oppressor (when you have to act according to somebody else’s schedule) or a liberator (you act on your own schedule). Some children, particularly those with ADD or related issues, do not have a good biological sense of time and have difficulty shifting back and forth between subjective time and objective time as the conditions of life demand. In later life, they may find that their experience of time is not smooth or fluid, and procrastination reflects this disjointed experience of time.
Teen Time
The onset of puberty marks a dramatic shift in one’s sense of time. There is undeniable evidence that time is passing, because the adolescent’s body is demonstrably different from the child’s body, and there’s no going back. These adolescent changes push away the childhood past; bodily sensations and passionate ideals reflect the present; and the yet-to-be-lived future offers the grandiose sense that life is limitless. As choices about schooling, work, and relationships become imminent, however, the future comes crashing into the present with deadlines for applications and demands for decisions.
People who are conflicted about this transition out of adolescence into adulthood may reject the dawning awareness that some roads will never be taken and may enlist procrastination in their refusal to grow up. Tenaciously holding onto the adolescent’s sense of endless time and limitless possibility, they put off achievements that would move them along the path toward adulthood—finishing school, getting a job and earning their own way, establishing an independent life. In a sense, they are attempting to deny the passage of time, struggling to remain an eternal child.
Young Adult Time
By your mid-to-late twenties, time is more tempered by reality, though it continues to stretch far into the future and feels like an abundant resource. Procrastinators often begin to examine their relationship with time more closely in this phase, as they consider the possibility that there is not enough time for everything, and some opportunities are slipping by. Procrastination is no longer a joke or something you can always make up for later. It begins to have more serious consequences: work deadlines have implications for career and income, and when you establish long-term relationships, procrastination impacts others as well.
When you are single, you’re the only one paying a price for your delay. Once you become part of a couple, someone else is directly affected by your delaying, and it can become a contentious issue in the relationship. If you become a parent, you are catapulted from being a member of the younger generation into being a member of the older generation on the day a child enters your life. From then on, “future” is defined in terms of the next generation. And from then on, your procrastination impacts the whole family.
Midlife Time
Thirty is a great divide. After thirty, you’re no longer a young person with lots of future potential; you are expected to live up to your potential! The thirties initiate midlife, when delays in career achievements and intimate relationships may become painful signals of being off-track. Since procrastinators have difficulty accepting limitation
s, they can be shocked in midlife to discover that they may not achieve some of the goals they always thought they would get around to “someday.” Some procrastinators struggle with depression in middle age, as it becomes clear, for example, that they will not have children, discover a cure for cancer, create a billion-dollar start-up company, or win a Pulitzer Prize.
Sometime in midlife, if it hasn’t sunk in before, we confront the fact that we all are destined to die. On a rational level, we all know that life ends, but at the same time, procrastinators live with the fantasy of the infinite—infinite time, infinite possibilities, infinite achievements, always more time to make up for all that has been put off. Coming to terms with the finiteness of time is a central psychological task of middle age: What have I done with my time so far? How much time do I have left? How do I want to spend that time? It can be difficult to look back and accept what you have chosen to do (or not) with your life and to look forward at the limitations as well as the possibilities for what lies ahead. No wonder people have midlife crises.
Senior Time
As we get older, it becomes even less possible to deny that time is running out. From late adulthood to old age, we are more and more surrounded by the realities of loss and death: physical capacities are lost; diseases develop; loved ones pass away; there is less and less time left to live. The future no longer holds the promise it did in earlier life stages. Clock time may no longer be very important, and subjective time matters much more.
For procrastinators who struggle against the finite, accepting the inevitable end of life can be a significant psychological challenge. At this point, the consequences of lifelong procrastination are undeniable. The money you never got around to saving isn’t there. The house remodel never happened. There will be no graduate school education. There is no more “tomorrow” or “someday.” Maybe it is possible to accept what you did and what you will never do. Looking back, you had your issues and anxieties; circumstances were what they were; you did what you could with what you had. Acceptance of the past might bring peace instead of despair or self-criticism. It might even be liberating to feel freed from having to chase the unattainable—finally. We certainly hope so.
STUCK IN ANOTHER TIME ZONE
Procrastinators, with their unique relationships to time, may have time perceptions that don’t match their current stage of life. For example, many adults who procrastinate still relate to time as they did when they were adolescents, who typically feel invulnerable and indifferent to the passage of time. As adults, they run into trouble because they are stuck in their teenage time perspective, which is out of sync with the adult world of work, family, health, and financial responsibilities.
Some people don’t allow themselves to think about the future. Did you expect to live to be the age you are now? If you never thought you would survive, or if you never thought you would age, then you may not have planned for the future or made decisions and choices that would provide opportunities and security. Many procrastinators ignore the possible future repercussions of their delaying in the present, but at some point, the unproductive present becomes the past, and the unexpected future becomes the present.
Almost always, procrastination catches up with us eventually. It’s one thing to put off a decision about having children when you are in your twenties and quite another when you are in your late thirties. Avoiding the effort required to research different health insurance plans or retirement options may not have major consequences in your thirties but will have a big impact in your fifties. When your time stage is not in sync with your life stage, you can procrastinate yourself into big trouble.
Lost in Time
A subjective sense of timelessness can lead to both positive and negative experiences.16 Heather was a single, thirty-two-year-old woman who enjoyed living in the moment. When she was surfing, she felt outside the bounds of clock time,17 immune from the demands and expectations of work, family, and culture. It was a freedom she found truly exhilarating.
Heather’s sense of timelessness, however, extended into her “regular” life and led her to ignore long-range goals—how long it might take to shape herself into a compelling applicant for graduate school, or how she was going to develop a long-term relationship so she could have the family she wanted. Her entry-level job didn’t pay well enough for her to buy the latest cell phone or laptop computer without adding to her credit card debt. She saw her friends making progress in their careers, but she hadn’t yet chosen hers. Living in the timeless “now” supported Heather’s feeling of freedom and separateness, but it did not help her move forward into her future.
You may have noticed that a sense of timelessness occurs with some of your deepest pleasures and most playful moments. Creative experiences feel timeless. When you are doing something that engages you deeply, you can’t tell if minutes or hours have passed. Being lost in time for an hour, a day, or a weekend can be profoundly rejuvenating and generative.
But if timelessness becomes your way of living, as it did for Heather, there may be serious consequences. It is essentially disorienting not to be able to tell the difference between the finite and the infinite.18 As we see with Heather, for whom time felt infinite, timelessness can lead to immobility, being stalled in life instead of developing. You may not even notice how much time has gone by while things apparently stay the same. Even though a sense of timelessness may feel soothing or safe in the present, procrastinators often pay a price for it in the future, when they are suddenly shocked to realize that life has passed them by.
Disconnected in Time
A sense of timelessness makes it hard to recognize the link between past, present, and future not only in time but also in ourselves.19 Procrastinators desperately want to believe in a future that has nothing to do with past problems. You may not want to recognize that the “you” who procrastinated last time is the very same “you” who has a project deadline this time. You may want to forget the feelings of dread, anxiety, and pressure you felt last time and assume instead that the New You will sail through the current project feeling capable and inspired.
The hope for a New You may be tantalizing, but it can also be problematic. Without accepting the connection between “you” in the past and “you” in the present and future, you lose the feeling of continuity that is part of an integrated self. If you live through time in separate, disconnected moments that are not linked together to form a coherent narrative, then those moments can have no real meaning.
In order to change how things are going, you first have to accept the experiences that make up your life. Then, you have to accept that it’s the Same Old You who is in charge of making changes. And, paradoxically, when you accept the Same Old You, you are starting where you truly are, and this makes it more possible to become a New You.
The Good Old Days
Josh reveled in the successes of his past. He had always been a gifted athlete, popular and successful. A college basketball star, he hoped to go all the way to the NBA, but a knee injury ended his basketball career. After that, Josh didn’t know what to make of himself. He began working in sales for a software company, where he was affable and likeable but didn’t bother to meet deadlines. Habitually late submitting sales reports and travel receipts, disdainful of the administrative aspect of his job, he resented the “nerdy” guys who got promoted or left the company for better jobs. “They’ve never done anything special in their lives,” he complained. “They never had a whole gymnasium chanting their name.”
Josh’s self-image was locked in the past, when he had been a star. But the present pressed on him whether he liked it or not. He was thirty-eight when his wife got pregnant. Then Josh’s father had a heart attack and died within a year. Josh was shocked to find himself in middle age holding a toddler at his father’s graveside.
We can see that living in the past might offer some psychological comfort. It seems to provide a safe haven from adult realities, which can feel demanding, overwhelming, and deflating
.20 Memories of past glories or fantasies of future success can function as a soothing buffer against the pain of real life or a stalled life.
It’s not just young people who live in the past: the realities of the next stage of life can be avoided at any age. Middle-aged people may put off going for medical checkups, because they don’t want to face the beginnings of their biological decline. In middle age, you may expect your body to behave as it did in your twenties, and you don’t want to accept that, even if you are active and healthy, body changes are inevitable. Many people in their fifties put off thinking about retirement or planning for their financial security, acting as if they will keep on working at the same pace and with the same abilities for the rest of their lives. Delaying forestalls a confrontation with some of the certainties associated with time: Time is passing; the future is coming; you are getting older; there are limits to what you will accomplish in your lifetime; and most starkly inevitable of all, eventually you will die.
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