My mother used to tell me never to make important decisions late at night. "Things always look better in the morning," she used to say. I think she was telling me not to pick 4 a.m. to quit my job or burn my novel-in-progress. I've always found it to be good advice. There's a recklessness to decisions made in the wee hours, when you've been up all night. But I think it's just that recklessness that can also free us to write brilliant essays, or least glimpse moments of our own brilliance. But don't take my word for it. Former US President Bill Clinton, in his autobiography, claims that he and his team of writers perfected his inauguration day speech on the morning of inauguration day, working through the night until 4 a.m. And if you think there might be something magic about that time of day/night, have a look at this comedian's Ted talk on 4 a.m. As the blog posts below suggest, many people's procrastination seems to stem from a fear that what they write, or choose, or finish, will not be good enough. Who wants to begin something that he or she might fail at? That's certainly at the root of a lot of my own procrastination (and the reason I have a nearly-finished novel that's been nearly finished for about four months). But at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., after the pizza's been eaten, after the third or fourth or sixth cup of coffee, when Jupiter and its four moons hang above the southern horizon, a kind of clarity and calm sometimes descends, dropping like the wind drops when it's blown all night. At those times, something seems to let loose deep in the heart of you, and you can write because it's now or never. And maybe you also see that getting a C on an essay would not be the end of the world and what matters more is that you're at the end of the semester, and you're still here, and you have plans and dreams and this is just one paper closer to them. And sometimes in those moments you can write what you really think, and you just type it out, thinking, "what the hell." Last night, around 4 a.m., a student asked me to look over her paper and when I started to give her detailed feedback about something like, "This quotation needs an introduction," she said, not unkindly, "Yeah, I know, I'm just getting down the basic ideas. I'll fix it tomorrow." That seems to me to be the goal of the long night against procrastination. Perfection is a worthy goal, but you're unlikely to ever think what you've done is perfect. There's a reason why the papers you write for university are called "essays," from the French word, essayer, to try. You can fix it tomorrow. Or you can fix it until you just have to hand it in and take whatever mark you get and move on.
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It must have been late 2004. I had just dropped out of college after failing a semester. I had only a few credits to get in order to graduate and pursue higher-level academic goals. I was good at school, but I hated it. And unfortunately, I had not a clue of what I wanted to be as an adult. I always thought it would come to me as an epiphany - somehow, someday. It never came.
Through the years following my school dropout, heavy drug use and alcohol binging added to my existential confusion and eventually, depression hit me, until I just wanted to give up on life. Procrastination became a way of living as I stopped envisioning long-term objectives. Travelling over the country, hitchhiking from coast to coast, was my way of spending the time until the miracle would happen. Going from one town to another, from one job to another, I started thinking of myself as a seed in the wind, waiting to drop at a location where I would germinate and root myself in. The method was risky, but proved to be good relief from the depression. I just never wanted to be an adult. I had no professional or academic ambitions anymore, no long-term plans. I wanted to drop out. I wanted to be free. I wanted to be the hero of a Jack Kerouac novel. I wanted to find out who I was, but the more I looked for it, the less it seemed attainable. I was better off making my own daily adventures - finding the next foodbank on the road, or shelter for the night and such; it became my full-time job. It felt great. I had a purpose, and it was exciting. At least for the first months. I temporarily went back to my hometown to get some rest before the next expedition. Those periods were always times to reconnect with old friends and old habits of drinking and substance abuse. On the one hand, I was becoming enraged and furious that I was not able to give my life meaning, while on the other, I was struggling to take the steps I needed to. I just could not wake up and make it through a day without the numbing state alcohol helped me to achieve. Numbness felt better to me than failure, at least. The alcohol brought out my impulsive anger that was triggered by successive concussions. I would confront anyone at any time for any given reasons I could find to justify my anger. It became clear to me that although I was physically and geographically moving, I was not going anywhere. There was nothing down the path but more frustration and anger. I spent so many days & nights alone on the road, re-thinking my life, that I lost track of time. This cycle went on for years until there was a sudden break in the pattern. One morning, in 2014, after a week of camping on the outskirts of Oliver, I went to an employment advising office in town. I browsed the job opportunities around South Okanagan when I spotted an ad that seemed to be the ideal: asking short-term commitment and giving me a revenue source, so I would be able to take to the road again as soon as I could. I called in, went for an interview and got the job. But this time, I never quit and never went back home. The exile from my homeland that I forced upon myself not only broke the vicious cycle of alcoholism and substance abuse, but it also gave me the stability to see things clearer. Eventually, after three years of juggling with the idea and developing a support network of friends and loved ones in my new hometown, I chose to get back to school. Maybe it is aging, or maybe is it just that I stopped procrastinating, I cannot tell. As I slowly drifted away from ambition, the years went by fast and now, here I am, in my thirties, back to college. My procrastination was my fear of making the wrong choices. My fear that my choices would trap me into being someone I wasn`t, or worse- that they would never even matter. I have hundreds of Kerouac-worthy stories to tell. I haven’t found my way yet, but I know I am taking steps towards in the right direction, because I am making choices despite the fear. This is a thing that I wrote. It's a lot longer and a lot later than it was supposed to be, but both the length and the lateness help illustrate the elements of procrastination as it relates to writing as a challenging endeavour that I want to get at, so I am going to pretend that both are intentional. Working on this long past the original deadline I was given also allowed me to avoid several other things that I did not want to do, so this blog post is about procrastination both in form and in function and serves to illustrate a very small, very sad version of the circle of life. I hope that I communicate an idea clearly here, but as is always the case in writing I have no sure way of knowing, and that is okay.
There is a moment: It's 2 AM, or last time you checked it was 2 but maybe it's 3 now, who knows? Your apartment building is tomb-silent; everyone else has gone to sleep, even that one nocturnal guy above you who seems to spend his entire life watching car shows. You pace, wild-eyed, alone in the night, muttering as you try to conjure the next sentence of your paper out of sheer need. You teeter, balanced precariously between a sense of awful clarity, the feeling that in your witching-hour desperation you've ascended to a higher plain of consciousness usually accessible only to the central figures of major religions and probably Yoda, and the reality that you have not slept in twenty-one hours and are now propelled forward only by a potent but finite mix of panic and denial. I know this moment well. Do you recognize it too? It is, I think, common to reproach ourselves at times like these: How could I have let myself procrastinate so much? How could I let myself fall into this trap? Surely nobody else in my class has made this mistake? We feel ashamed: we have managed our time poorly, and this late-night toil when worthy folk who started the whatever-it-is early are comfortably asleep is our just punishment. Or, alternatively, we feel abnormal: we are powered by pressure, and this frantic rush is how we do our best work, but we know this is unhealthy. I think, though, that this kind of procrastination is really quite normal. I procrastinate all the time. I procrastinated while writing this, and not only so I could make an obvious joke about having done so (although that was part of the reason.) Lots of people, people who do good work, procrastinate either occasionally or regularly; it is not some shameful character flaw that you alone struggle against. I see procrastination as being sort of like The Walking Dead (with apologies to anybody who loves that show unreservedly): very occasionally it's good, usually it's terrible, but good or bad it's not going anywhere; it's just a part of our culture at this point and we must each find our own way of dealing with its stubborn refusal to stop happening — even those of us who consciously avoid it are still engaging in behaviour that takes account of its existence. That procrastination is ubiquitous doesn't make it healthy, but it does make it understandable and manageable and something you shouldn't necessarily beat yourself up for. It's not a crisis, either of character or of anything else, though it can create crises if it goes totally unchecked. Several previous contributors to this blog, including Sarah and Dr. Griffiths, have taken us through some of the underlying causes of procrastination, fun, achingly-human phenomena like assertions of control, fear of doing poorly, and the Giant Snowball of Shame. I can say with great confidence that I have experienced each of these; they ring very true to me. I think those of us who write, either because we have to or because we want to, can be aware of the traps that lead to procrastination and still find them tough to avoid. One of the methods I use to nudge myself toward procrastination-busting behaviours like careful time management and taking the first un-fun steps in a project despite not enjoying them, and take this with a grain of salt because it has in no way stopped me from procrastinating, is simply to remind myself, gently but persistently, that writing is hard. This may seem stupidly straightforward, but the reason I find it useful goes like this: As soon as it becomes clear that I have to write something, I will often do one of two self-destructive things. I will either A: go "well, that looks like a pretty simple thing I can finish in a couple of hours, which means I can spend the next two weeks ignoring it completely," or else I will B: take one look at it and go "THAT LOOKS HARD AND FRIGHTENING AND WHEN I DO A BAD JOB EVERYBODY WILL KNOW THAT I AM STUPID, BACK AWAY, BACK AWAY." Both of these reactions, I think, have a lot to do with temporarily forgetting that it is okay for writing to be difficult. In the first case, I am equating writing with the simple act of typing and forgetting all the complexities that proceed writing an idea down, while in the second I am getting too caught up in those complexities, becoming so absorbed in all the ways I could screw my project up that it becomes very hard for me to in fact write anything. Writing is one of those things that can appear small and non-threatening and then turn out to be almost endlessly involving, like a quiet stream that you discover too late hides a wicked undertow beneath its placid surface: You're not building a bridge or doing rocket science, you're just sitting in front of a keyboard, or a blank page, or a touchscreen if you're a masochist, typing some stuff, so how long can it possibly take? ... except you must first construct the idea your words will express, then break that idea down into organized steps so the reader doesn't choke on it, then take a break and have a snack or go for a walk or watch an episode of something or think about puppies because it's good to give your brain time to cycle, then choose the right words to get your idea across, and then put them in the clearest possible order, and you must do all of this many times in the course of a single project. It's exhausting just thinking about it. Expressing yourself in writing can be a daunting task, even if you're fulfilling a school or work-related obligation rather than articulating your deeply-held opinions. And, while other people can and do help us with our writing in vital ways, whether through encouragement or example or feedback, this task of expressing our ideas successfully is, in the end, up to us: To embark on a writing project of any length is to step onto a lonely road through a dark wood, with only our own powers of communication to lead us out again. It's scary. So we, or at least many of us, avoid: So long as our project is not begun, it exists in a delicate state of suspension in which it might go well, in which we might communicate our ideas effectively, and, whether because we have forgotten how demanding the work is actually going to be or because we remember all too well, dwelling in this schrodinger's cat space in which we have not yet forced ourselves to commit our ideas to paper is more pleasant and less painful than actually doing what we're meant to be doing. This all means that, yes, it can be helpful to manage our time and make certain we don't underestimate how long it takes to do this kind of work or get too caught up agonizing over the pre-writing stages, but I think it also means that we must always acknowledge that when we write something of substance we are trying to do a difficult thing, and respect our own attempts to do that difficult thing. In other words, I don't think we should demonize ourselves when we procrastinate our writing, even though procrastination is certainly unhelpful and a thing we should not be doing. We're not avoiding the work because we're bad students or bad writers or bad people; we've just forgotten how tough writing is, or else remembered all too well, but forgotten that this difficulty is a thing everybody struggles with and not something to be shamed or frightened by. Writing is hard. And that's okay. It's that time of year; I have homework up to my eyeballs, and my apartment's never been cleaner. A few months back, my apartment was a disaster, and I surpassed my fitness goals. Last summer, I hardly picked up a dumbell, and I was caught up on summer reading.
Everyone looks at procrastination as a bad thing, yet I am never more driven...to do anything else. Nobody says that the distracting task needs to be a time-waster. Productive tasks can also serve to distract me from the main objective. Eventually, it all needs to get done. You might as well spend your time distracting yourself from A priority tasks with B priority tasks (that will eventually become A priorities) than watch every single video on your newsfeed after getting caught up on your watch later list. What's important to remember is that there is always a more daunting task just waiting to be avoided. Whenever I get the oppressive notion that I really ought to hit the books, I just remember that I've also got taxes to do. Basically, procrastination means delaying work, or even, in some cases, leaving it to the last minute. Why do people procrastinate? Many people do it simply because they don’t have an interest in the work they’ve been given, for example, if a student is given an essay topic by his teacher that focuses on a topic the student doesn’t have interest in. Many thoughts could come to the student’s mind, like “how can I top what others are doing?”, “this stuff is so boring” and “I can’t make it”. All of these thoughts can be very discouraging, and promote procrastination.
Most people have smart phones nowadays, and we are all starting to become dependent on them. Many of us need an alarm to wake up in the morning, or to remind us of things we have to do. It’s a small thing, but nobody seems to address that there is not only a stop option for our alarms, but a snooze option too. When our alarm rings, many of us instinctively hit snooze. It seems that technology is actually making a path for us to procrastinate, even as our day starts. But technology also leads to us delaying work and other important things. It is 7:30 am and being an early morning person, I sit here smugly, feeling like I am already ahead of the game; after all, I have fed my cats and the Quail family outside, cleaned litter boxes, had breakfast, let the dog out, and caught up on the news. Why not throw in a blog on Procrastination into the mix of things to do today? There are still 12 good hours to go. Let's see what happens. I often get my best ideas while in the shower; off I go at 7:50 am. Wait, how did I already spend 20 minutes on this blog?
8:06 I am back at my desk. Unfortunately all I could think about, besides the three school assignments due the first week of April, was if rhetorical questions are acceptable in blog-writing. I'll stop by the library later and ask. I have not decided between my two blog titles yet: “Procrastination – The Blaming Game” or “Procrastination – Is Time an Illusion?” If time is an illusion, however, then being an early morning person may prove not to be as much of the advantage in life as I always believed it to be. The Blaming Game, now who doesn't want to jump in and participate in that? 8:30 am - I have to get ready for school. 11 hours left to go! But before I go, I wonder, how long are blogs supposed to be and what are the recommended paragraph lengths? I better add those questions for the librarian to answer as well. 9:30 am - I got the answers I needed from the library staff. I'm good to go. I really need to learn to reach out for help more often; it could become a game-changer. I also went online and found out that paragraphs in blogs are to be short. 2-3 sentences max. Sorry Francie! I struggled in deciding between my two titles, so I am combining them into one! Done. Off to my 10:00 am class. 2:30 pm - I am back at home and feel like I have been on a mini self-discovery journey by being really present to my thoughts while writing this blog. It made me aware of all the questions, and excuses, that come up and can sabotage your good intentions, and even excitement, of writing your first blog: “This was supposed fun”, “I don't get a grade for this, so why even write it?” and “Why did I agree to this?” to name just a few non-constructive thoughts that came up. 7:15 am - I couldn't see the lesson in this exercise yesterday, but my personal experience about procrastination is that reaching out to others, like our librarians, or English teacher, may just be the ticket to “re-charging” and staying on track. Procrastination is a personal matter, yes, but you are not alone. See you on the 30th! I want things to happen, but procrastination takes over. There are times when I start something and I don't bother to finish what I started. I leave it for later or for the last minute. For instance, I started a working-out routine at the college gym. My goal was to lose weight and get back into shape. I went for a few days, then procrastination took over. I put it off and became lazy, saying I would go later (never happens). I have no reason to make up excuses. Putting things aside becomes a habit. I must make a change to those bad habits.
My advice on procrastination?
What we don't enjoy doing, do it first! As college students, I'm sure we all understand the struggle of getting that paper in before the due date. We procrastinate up until the last minute even though we know that we should have started about 2 months ago. But what if I told you that procrastination can be a positive tool? In my case at least, I see a significant improvement in my productivity and my abilities when I feel the stress of an assignment. I believe that although leaving an assignment to the night before may not be the best idea (but hey, stuff happens sometimes), it may not be a negative thing to wait a little bit to start that math assignment that isn't due until much later. Focus on the tasks at hand in the moment, feel the positive energy that comes from a little bit of stress, and be efficient in finishing your kick-ass assignment! Then rinse, wash and repeat for the next one.
There's no sense in struggling through the two months before a deadline, writing one sentence at a time and worrying about it the whole time. See your deadlines as a positive way to get yourself motivated and "in-the-zone". Maybe I shouldn't be advocating for procrastination in an anti-procrastination blog post, but finding the right balance between starting too early and starting too late is my key for finding my optimal student "flow and rhythm". Cheers, hope this can help someone! Procrastination
It is the curse of our generation But perhaps this state that I am in Is even a greater level of sin Those little boxes with screens that each one of us own Constantly go "ding ding", making us groan We waste all our time with snap chat and texts I bet it's something that come exam time we will regret But why write that paper when there's a new episode out? Netflix has wrecked my life, there is no doubt Instagram, Twitter, Facebook will not stop updating me I want to quit but there's nowhere to flee Perhaps it is time to go get a headstart Ahh screw it! I'm not that smart |
OC faculty, staff & studentsWe made this space available to share our sometimes sorry, sometimes heroic, stories of procrastination. Please scroll down to read all the entries. To submit, send your entry to [email protected] Archives
November 2021
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