Many of us have been taught that procrastination is a personal failing, and natural procrastinators are often invited to feel ashamed of themselves. Thankfully, a new understanding of procrastination is slowly gaining ground.
A new approach to procrastination
The old idea is that procrastinators have to improve themselves. It often assumes people who use procrastination as a tool aren’t clever. Their natural way of getting things done is treated as a mistake, and they’re continually told how to focus, organize themselves, make plans, write lists, and become skilled task masters.
Even today, endless books on organization and time management tell procrastinators how to stop procrastinating and get things done on an acceptable schedule.
Natural procrastinators are usually told that they need to become someone they’re not in order to be seen as productive. The old idea is that procrastinators are not functional and need to be fixed.
Luckily for the natural procrastinators among us, that old idea is wrong.
Procrastination and motivation
In her book, What Motivates Getting Things Done: Procrastination, Emotions, and Success, Mary Lamia focuses on anxiety as our motivational emotion. Anxiety helps us look ahead and prepare ourselves for the future—and it helps us organize ourselves to arrive in that future with the skills and resources we need.
Lamia notes there are two main approaches we can use in our motivational efforts: task orientation (do-it-aheading), or deadline orientation (procrastination).
I had heard Lamia talking about these two motivational styles on a radio show in 2010, and I added this genius idea to my Dynamic Emotional Integration model soon after. I also created a short quiz to help you determine which motivational style you use: Are You a Procrastinator?
I explain the difference in this way:
- Deadline-oriented procrastinators focus on deadlines and wait until their anxiety reaches a level of intensity that compels them to act, like leaping into a lake in one big jump.
- Task-oriented do-it-aheaders focus on individual tasks and complete them one after another on their way to a deadline, like carefully crossing a stream from stone to stone on their way to the lake.
Both are completely valid ways to work with anxiety and motivation, though task-oriented people receive mostly praise, while deadline-oriented people receive mostly criticism. This is such a shame, because there is a hidden reward in procrastination that do-it-aheading can erase: creativity.
Creativity lives in rest, quiet, and ‘not-doing’
When we procrastinate and seemingly do nothing, our brains are not idle (Immordino-Yang et al, 2012). When we focus inward and take a break from external tasks and schedules, we allow time for our brains to catch up to our busy lives. Short-term memories can move into long-term storage. We can reflect on troubling situations that may have become stacked up as our busy lives barreled onward. We may access dreams and wishes that have been shoved aside by endless to-do lists, and we may be able to hear our inner voices again.
In these seemingly lazy times, we are doing deeper, internal, and often wordless processing, and our innate creativity can blossom. Procrastination, then, can help us complete our work—not as task-driven machines, but as creative, self-reflective, and whole people.
A task-oriented person learns how to procrastinate
I am naturally task-oriented: organized, list-focused, and time-managed. I get praised for my work ethic, and before I understood the value of procrastination, I looked down on procrastinators as lazy during their waiting periods, overwrought during their high anxiety periods, and lucky when they met their deadlines at the last minute. Like most people, I saw procrastination as a character flaw.
Procrastination Essential Reads
But as I wrote my book, Embracing Anxiety, I decided to learn how to procrastinate: to stop writing lists, adhering to a schedule, meeting my deadlines weeks before they arrived, and organizing every part of my life. I also prepared myself to deal with the surge of anxiety that procrastinators rely on to meet their deadlines at nearly the last second.
Let me be honest: It was scary as hell. I saw how much my self-image rested on my ability to get things done before deadlines. But it was also eye-opening. I observed how little I naturally rested, how I couldn’t leave tasks unfinished, and how I became rootless when I wasn’t on task. Fascinating.
My book was due on the 15th of the month, and it was finished, but I made myself rest, even though my task orientation screamed at me to turn in the manuscript early. On the 13th, I woke up from a dream about the book, and realized that an entire chapter needed to go, and that I needed to write an entirely new concluding chapter. In two days!
So after letting my anxiety come up, I worked like a sled dog to meet that deadline—to the second—with a much better book than I had on the 13th. Hooray, procrastination.
The roots of the word ‘procrastination’
A year later, a few days after Embracing Anxiety debuted, my friend Chris posted this on his Facebook page:
Procrastination, from the Latin, means “Belonging to tomorrow” or “Deferred until the morning.”
I laughed, because it was a perfectly missed task for me not to have looked up the word procrastination for my book. And like so many creative impulses, this bit of genius arrived in its own time, on a deadline that I couldn’t have anticipated.
Before I learned how to procrastinate, I sometimes worked into the middle of the night to finish tasks. I honestly didn’t know what belonged to tomorrow. I didn’t know how to defer until the morning. But now, thanks to the creative genius of procrastination, I sort of do.
I will likely always speak procrastination with an accent, but I’ve learned the value of rest and seeming aimlessness. Creativity, it turns out, lives in the spaces between the tasks and the deadlines.
