On putting off for tomorrow…

The habit of procrastination is one that is natural to most people. Self-help manuals and efficiency gurus rail against wasting time — time, which is such a valuable and non-renewable resource. “Make every minute count,” they rant, daring anyone to challenge them. So convincing is this rant that congenital time-wasters like myself also feel ashamed and guilty enough to try and mend my ways. Needless to say, the change is short-lived.

I want to pause here and examine the tendency to procrastinate (which is generally seen as equivalent to ‘wasting’ time). Why does one do it? The ‘net offers multiple answers to this question.

Speaking for myself, let me clarify that I do not start off with the aim of putting off work. I begin with good and honourable intentions to finish the work well before time so as to allow for any necessary revisions, thus making the job as watertight and complete as possible. In practice, however, I may have to deal with multiple simultaneous commitments and prioritising becomes necessary. The most urgent tasks need to be dealt with first. This happens repeatedly until the comfortable margin to complete the original task shrinks down to a few days or hours. In my defence, allow me to say that time constraints have never yet caused me to turn in sub-standard work.

So, multi-tasking is one reason for salaried professionals to procrastinate on important tasks. Another may be the sheer boredom associated with some tasks that may cause one to put them off in the hope of developing a frame of mind more conducive to getting them done. Of course, this causes the time crunch issue again, and this time multiplicity of tasks cannot be used as an excuse. Another reason associated with this one is the crazy hope that ignoring the task long enough may cause it to get done automatically, or that someone else will do it, or that the need to do it will simply disappear. None of this, alas, ever happens. Sometimes, of course, it’s sheer laziness that drives one to keep putting off the evil moment.

However, is procrastination really such a bad thing? Why must we rush around as if we were being chased by Old Harry himself? Why can we not take time to think things through before rushing headlong into completing tasks? I find that thinking about things before actually plunging into them helps one to plan properly; tasks get completed more efficiently.

Is it just me or does the world seem obsessed with getting as much as possible done in as short a while as possible? In addition to using guilt trips, technology is now being harnessed to make us more productive and efficient. In print and electronic form, products abound to make us work harder and better and to keep us on track. Sometimes if feels like these products are designed specifically to take away any excuses for procrastination. Daily, weekly, monthly, or annual planners to sort out one’s commitments, techniques to use journals to plan work, relaxation, meals and fitness (BuJo is all the rage now), reminders set on mobile phones and email, devices that are increasing in portability and capabilities so that one can work irrespective of where one is, calendars staring accusingly at one on every one of those devices — really, what has life come down to? We’re absolutely being bullied into efficiency and herded into becoming ‘productive’ members of the world. To what end? If wasting time is to be avoided, what are we expected to do with all the extra time that we will finally be left with? Or are we expected to use that to do even more work?

Funnily enough, if one is determined to waste time one always finds a way, and recently I caught myself doing just that. Like Jerome K. Jerome, I am fascinated by work: I can sit and watch it for hours. I also love making to-do lists. Having just become acquainted with BuJo, I once spent a happy morning comparing software for maintaining such a journal — and this at a time when I had some other pressing work requiring my immediate attention. (Oh, do give it a rest! One can hardly be said to have wasted time if one has been researching ways to save it!) And in case you’re wondering if the journal worked for me, it did not. I uninstalled it after a month because it kept accusing me of not spending enough time with it.

Coming back to what I was saying, all this rushing around confuses me. Why is it necessary? Unfortunately, the world seems to have psyched itself up into believing with the Red Queen that you have to run as fast as you can to stay in place, and twice as fast if you want to get somewhere. And so we must be up and doing, with a heart for any fate. Irrespective of how much work actually gets done, the pressures to at least appear busy are tremendous. Just taking a ramble, or sitting out in the porch or in the balcony staring out at the world are no longer acceptable as ends in themselves. The ramble should be made to serve a purpose as fitness activity, or if one must sit around then one must at least be accompanied by a book or a cup of coffee to gain acceptability for the time spent. Oddly enough, staring into a mobile phone screen does not generally get classified as wastage of time (unless the observer is a parent and the one being observed is a teenager). All in all, one tends to draw accusatory or suspicious looks if one is doing nothing. Even congenital procrastinators like myself feel compelled to make excuses for being the way I am and for not conforming to general expectations. It’s a hard life. No wonder some people dread the thought of professional retirement and take care to plan activities for that period of their lives, too.

It’s a sad fact that all the spoken and unspoken criticism finally begins to wear one down. These days I find that I am generally so keyed up about multiple tasks waiting to get done that my mind refuses to relax. There’s constant anxiety about impending deadlines, a feeling of being pulled in several directions at once, a lack of sleep thinking of the work that’s piling up, a feeling of not being good enough or capable enough — not a very happy state of affairs. In fact, I have psyched myself up to such an extent that I shall go right this instant and make a to-do list. Better still, I shall download a software to help me make such a list so that it can go everywhere with me and remind me of what needs doing. So let me just Google the best options for such a purpose and then I shall go to Playstore to download it….