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By Root 303 0

these brief fits of procrastination have little effect on the course of our life. But we also procrastinate for days, months, and years at a time. Conditions never seem quite right for the initiation of our project. We can’t start to diet this week because we’re going to have visitors who must be wined and dined. Next week, we’re invited to a wedding feast. The week after, we’re overwhelmed with work and feel the need to be easy on ourselves in other ways. We can’t find any obstacles the week after that; but we decide to indulge for just a little longer. After all, it won’t make any difference in the long run whether we begin to diet today or seven days from now. Seven days later, we’re invited to another feast … Now, whether to diet is our own affair. We can choose to be as fat as we like. But if we’ve decided to lose weight, we are trapped in a monumental procrastination.

Formally, procrastination is a minor variation on the theme of resistance. In both traps, we hold back from an undertaking whose time has come. The difference lies in our intention toward the new task. When we resist, we don’t recognize or accede to the legitimate demands of a new call to action. The emergency, opportunity, or interruption is imposed on us from the outside, and we refuse to place it on our agenda. But when we procrastinate, the call to action is our own. We want to write the letter. We’ve already decided that we will write it. And still we hold back.

Another difference between resistance and procrastination is that the former finds us already occupied with a previous activity that we’re reluctant to abandon in midstream. When we procrastinate, however, we don’t appear to be busy with anything else. On the contrary, we may go out of our way to search out obscure and unimportant chores that give us an excuse for not getting started. This quest for make-work is very curious. Since it’s we ourselves who have decided what to do next, what keeps us from beginning?

If we were waiting for conditions to become more favorable, our behavior would be considered fixated. Indeed, procrastinative activities bear a remarkable similarity to fixation. In both cases, we perform useless and disconnected acts such as twiddling our thumbs. In fixation, we twiddle to kill time until the moment for action arrives. But in procrastination, the moment for action has already come and still we twiddle. Then what are we waiting for?

The commonest cause for procrastination is undoubtedly a simple aversion to the new line of work. We know that it must be done, but we’re loath to enter upon our allotted suffering. Standing at the end of the high diving board, our escape route blocked by a dozen taunting children, we know that we have to jump—that we will jump. But still we hesitate. Now holding back in the face of an unwelcome experience is eminently sensible if we don’t ourselves accept its necessity. The condemned man who dawdles on his way to the gas chamber is not guilty of procrastination. In fact, to plunge into what we dislike before circumstances force our hand is the trap of anticipation. But once the necessity of suffering for a greater good has been acknowledged, holding back is a waste of time.

Aversion to the task can’t be the whole story, however. Often enough, we procrastinate even when we know from experience that the new business won’t be so awful once we get started. Once the letter is begun, it’s relatively painless to continue to the end. There’s a peculiar difficulty at the beginning that defies explanation in purely hedonistic terms. If the reluctance to start were wholly due to our aversion to the task, we would continue to experience it after we had begun. The second sentence of the letter would be just as stressful as the first. We would always be falling away from our engagement with the task and having again to overcome our procrastinative tendencies. But in fact the initial struggle with procrastination is usually enough to see us through. Of course, this is sometimes due to our discovery that the work wasn’t as bad as we had expected.