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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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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