Procrastination

Do you knowingly defer life to later? Have you chosen a profession you don't love and put off pursuing one you do? Do you spend your best hours on chores and trivia before allowing yourself to get to what matters most to you? Have you ever knowingly embarked on a relationship with the wrong person in the hope you will eventually find the right one? If you have answered yes to any of the questions above, you too are a procrastinator and as such are both blessed and tortured. Contrary to what we might think, procrastination is not an affliction of the chronically vacillating but of the highly motivated. Our modern age was already a golden era of the procrastinator long before the universe of distraction offered by personal electronic devices and online media opened up and swallowed us whole. Today procrastination is fuelled principally by our modern cult of individual autonomy, self-fulfilment, and productivity as a measure of the value of our life. But if these are its root causes, then the almost universal consensus around overcoming it - to do lists, deadlines, breaking up tasks into small chunks of activity and time, avoiding perfectionism, exhorting oneself to "just do it", and focusing on the tragedy of regret if one doesn't do it - is unlikely to succeed. Procrastination reaches back into the long history of alarm about why we postpone or avoid what we take to be in our best interests, from the desert monks of 4th century Egypt to the medieval Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, from the ancient Greeks to Chinese and Hindu sources. Simon May argues that procrastination - unlike indolence, with which it is often confused - has blessings as well as dangers, for it can powerfully illuminate who we really are and what we most deeply value. At the same time, any solutions to it need to go far beyond the time management agenda to touch the very way we see the world.