Lametations and Ruminations on Procrastination

I am a terrible procrastinator. This used to be something I was proud of myself for: I could wait until the last minute and still turn out wonderful papers, finish assigned readings and study for midterms and manage an A average in my classes – it was wonderful!

But now it’s not. Part of me thinks that this is because I’m getting older. I may be only twenty-five but that also means that I’m no longer nineteen – I can’t stay up for forty-eight hours straight finishing up essays or blog entries and still be energetic enough to work the next day. Part of me recognizes that I get into more trouble when I procrastinate now than I did before: work is not school, and responsibilities come back to bite me in the ass – my boss won’t forgive me for dozing in the office the same way a professor teaching an 8 am class would, and I dislike reprimands from people who write my paychecks. But the biggest part of me recognizes the core of why I don’t enjoy procrastination the same way I did when I was a college student: simply put, procrastination is the refuge of intelligent, lazy people.

In school we all knew the procrastinators who couldn’t get away with it – they were the ones whose presentations sounded stilted, who were missing vital information, and whose papers and tests usually came back with less-than-optimal scores. Rarer were the successful procrastinators, like me, but you probably knew (and might have been jealous of) the students who darted to the library to print out essays completed only minutes before class, whose papers were handed back with compliments. In school we knew these people, and pitied or envied or were contemptuous of them or hated them, but we knew them.

Out in the non-academic world I’m finding procrastinators harder to come by, probably because procrastination is ineffective.

I said earlier that procrastination is the refuge of intelligent, lazy people. It shelters people who know that they’re capable of creating a good product with less time, and so rather than passing their time in the tedium of putting together a methodical, perfect paper, procrastinators rely on a nervous zeal to move their work from page to page; their papers are lauded for the authenticity of the energy in the work, and why not? The energy is authentic – it’s hard to be inauthentically energetic when you’re writing at four in the morning after pounding a couple of Red Bulls. So people who know they’re smart, and may be aware that they are lazy, put off the work until the work MUST be done, gleefully spending their stolen time on the web or out with friends or drinking or watching TV or doing chores or ANYTHING to keep from having to do the real work.

This works nicely, and is a fairly acceptable practice, in college because college is kind in that you are given firm deadlines.

The non-academic world is unfortunately not so kind. There are no firm deadlines, no neat assignments, and intelligence doesn’t get you as far as diligence, a fact which I both respect and loathe.

My penchant for procrastination makes my job difficult; thus far I’ve avoided getting into trouble over it but it makes my days at a desk long and dull – if I were actually working at a reasonable pace I’d have something to do all the time instead of having frantic periods of catching up and mind-numbing hours of work avoidance. But worse than that, procrastination is preventing me from doing what I really want to do: write.

I’m great at writing under pressure – this blog is a fantastic example: I forgot that I was supposed to blog today until about noon, then I kicked around a couple of ideas for a couple of hours, then I sat down to write a blog at around 11:10 and I fully expect to be finished by 11:45 – but while this is a pretty good little essay, it is somewhat less than insightful and substantially more self revealing than something I would have written if I’d allowed myself more time.

Who is hurt by this sort of behavior? You, the readers, who have every right to expect good, pertinent blogs from our editors. The site, possibly, because I’m showing that I’m laughably under-prepared to be a real-life magazine editor and it could reflect poorly on our magazine. But mostly it hurts me – I wrote this because I didn’t have time to write what I wanted to write, and so what I wanted to write is lost; confessing about my procrastination MAY reflect badly on the magazine, but it really shows an aspect of myself that I dislike to a fairly large audience.

I’m trying to get over procrastination, but it’s hard – I honestly don’t give a fuck about my current job, so it doesn’t bother me in that area, but I’ve been trying to work on my novel (and a few short stories, and a few dozen poems, and a few late Christmas presents) for a long time now, but I keep finding my laziness getting in the way. I’m done with that bullshit, and I wish I had been done with it a long time ago.

So what does this all come to, why did I decide to share all of this with you? Because I know a lot of college students who read this blog and I wanted to give you a warning. Procrastination is for assholes, the people who are big enough dicks that they can’t be bothered to consider their audience or their friends. It works okay in college, but you still come off as an asshole, and it doesn’t work at all when you’re out. Do yourself a favor and give yourself time – make pressure in another way if you work best under pressure, but don’t put your work off – it’s an easy habit to get into and a hard habit to drop; laziness is a lot like heroin in that way, except when you overdose you don’t die you just fall into unaccomplished mediocrity. And really, to someone smart, proud, and able, which is worse?

Lately yours,
Alli