“This is the only video you need to watch to beat procrastination!”
“Here’s why you’re procrastinating and how to stop”
“How procrastination destroyed my life”
“5 quick tips to help you stop procrastinating”
We’ve all come across such titles and thumbnails on Youtube, Instagram and Google when we were in the trenches of our academic or professional lives and needed that one piece of life-changing advice that would perform a miracle and help us instantly stop procrastinating. And after finding that one ‘Guru’ or reading that one mind-blowing piece of literature, you remember feeling good about yourself. Even empowered. Little do you know, while watching those videos or reading those articles, you were performing a variant of procrastination itself.
Not all forms of procrastination are detrimental and there are some relatively benign forms of this phenomenon where one can achieve different forms of productivity. One said form is when we end up completing our smaller tasks in the bid to avoid the bigger, more intimidating tasks. This form of procrastination is also called structured procrastination where you deliberately choose the less urgent or important tasks instead of the most pressing ones as a medium to put off the more pressurising tasks. For instance, organising your entire shelf instead of writing a due research paper or restocking your groceries instead of learning material for a class. The other variant of procrastination is the one which leads you to listen to an entire 30-minute video essay or read an entire Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on a random topic. The kind which makes you ponder how great it would be to start a true crime podcast or make a painting. I like to term it as the ‘creative procrastination’ and this article will further discuss the second variant in depth.
But before we do so, we need a paradigm shift with regard to how we view procrastination. This is essential because of the negative connotations attached with this phenomenon which can render our approach prejudiced. We have to understand how procrastination is not just a human trait to be frowned upon but how it can also be a source of great imagination, innovation and originality if reconstructed and reconstrued in the right way. It must be understood as a means of the mind to explore realities outside our mundane one and a place where we could find great inspiration and enrichment. Hence, to explore this as a possible opportunity, we must shed the lenses the ‘productivity gurus’ on Youtube and elsewhere have made us wear. Sure, they mean well but they’ve managed to generalise a phenomenon, leaving no room to explore its intricacies or the possible layers to the concept. Therefore, let us instead approach the topic with the philosophy of ‘tabula rasa’ referring to a mind open to new ideas without any preconceived notions or prejudice. Procrastination, a word most oft associated with not only negative connotations but also sometimes with heavy and serious consequences. However, what most fail to understand is that just like stress, which has been divided scientifically into eustress and distress, procrastination too, has that thin line which demarcates the area of productive procrastination from that of chronic procrastination. While the latter is where the serious consequences lie, the former can actually serve as a means to achieve productive tasks, only not in the domains we intended to achieve.
After we have established a neutral base with the term, let’s delve into how productive procrastination can serve as a source of innovation and originality.
When we perform structured procrastination, we’re only working on tasks we’ve got to do anyway but are not urgent or demanding in nature. The idea of performing them doesn’t bring along the daunting fear of a bad performance or the colossal size of the task doesn’t make you feel like your skillset might be inadequate for the job at hand. These tasks are banal but you need to get them done anyway. Hence you end up picking up your laundry, organising your shelves and feeding your pet twice before you begin with writing the article or making that call.
On the other hand, the creative procrastination drives us into an entirely new, unexplored plane. It forces you to think of the most interesting things that can hold your attention and even drift it away entirely. It can serve as a medium for the brain to exercise other mental faculties such as creativity or make us learn something new entirely. For instance, when we skip homework and instead end up making an entire business plan for a business that will never exist. Or when we abandon our math problems and delve deep into the life story of a random philosopher and end up reading all of their queer-coded letters to their ‘friend’. These moments of procrastination are actually really powerful avenues to practice our creativity and come up with innovative ideas. The brain will do anything to escape the mundane and menial work we are bound by for our whole lives. This escape provides an increment in motivation to do ANYTHING but work and this is precisely the energy we need to use and channel.
When our brain is given the time to wander, it often finds opportunities to question, to create and to find answers to questions. It helps us view the world differently, with an approach that allows observation, creativity, patience and originality play their part. It helps us step out of the rigid lines and look at things through the lens of other phenomena. We could probably draw a parallel here. Think of how Chess players allow their minds to wander during intense matches. Like when 8th World Chess Champion Mikhail Tal couldn’t think of a way to get the hippopotamus out of the muddy puddle and decided to sacrifice it, all of which went on in his head while playing against GM Vasiukov during the USSR Chess Championship. It was then he decided that the piece he was struggling to move had to be ultimately sacrificed in order for him to win the game in the long run. Creative procrastination also accords us a period of reflection which gives us brilliant avenues to go over older ideas and refine them or find solutions to stalemates we find ourselves stuck in. After all, some of the greatest solutions discovered were done so at a time when they weren’t meant to be discovered at all. Thinking actively about a problem can sometimes lead us around in circles and procrastinating may be able to give new direction to this search.
Creative procrastination can also be thought of as a distracted energy that we must channel for more productive uses. When we do not want to practice those tedious problems, we must not resist and instead use this rebellious energy for something much akin to our creative pursuits. For example, if reading a legal judgment becomes too taxing for a law student, she may find herself to be procrastinating but instead of doing some random task that isn’t going to amount to much, I suggest we all have a ‘procrastination plan’ in place, which is essentially, an idea or some project that you’ll work on when you feel like procrastinating. There can be multiple plans in case you feel like procrastinating for the subject of the first plan. The idea here is to have some passion project in place that you can work on as an escape from the more unassuming realities of life. This project can also be a medium for you to exercise your mundane tasks in a more creative way. For example, a psychology student could create a podcast where the criminal psychology of the murderers or the mental disorders of famous personalities could be discussed, making the entire process of learning material for exams more fun. This can not only help you channel this otherwise wasted energy but also make this procrastination plan into something much more valuable, something akin to a passion project of sorts, but only if you procrastinate consistently enough of course.
All in all, there are multiple lenses to look at things and while procrastination cannot always be viewed positively, we do not need to frown upon it so often as well. This phenomenon, when not in its chronic form, is actually only distracted or unguided energy which when channelled can result in something that partially, if not entirely, helps us come up with something original and innovative, both of which we severely lack in our daily lives. Hence when viewed with such a lens, we can definitely have more ease when dealing with procrastination and we may even be able to employ it to our favor. So the next time you find yourself procrastinating, don’t be quick to berate yourself and instead, let yourself wander, think, question and create.
