Procrastination: a way of dancing with time, coming in close, and backing away!!

Just because the majorities are doing it, doesn’t make it a healthy choice….

When I started this column one of the reason for starting it was to make myself accountable to a wide audience of invisible people and basically stop procrastinating and write my damn article already. It has been a while since I last wrote and published, since I’m using this column as virtual motivation … aww shheeehh I thought I had stuff to write here. It’s fleeing as I try to put my finger on it. I have an application essay to write, a girls night out to plan (yes, another one), and love tragedies to solve, but that I have things to say here, I better stay focused! Yeah I have to focus here … may be it will clarify things if I begin with the definition of procrastination “putting off or delaying or deferring an action or task to a later time.”….

Why do we procrastinate so much? We procrastinate on well, everything. Personally in my case, I'll sit in my bedroom staring at my backpack with this damn feeling in my gut, and then go on the computer and hang on in face-book/twitter or Skype for hours. Ideal self is now consumed with anxiety as I push myself to make up for lost time. I set no reasonable limits to my activity, convinced that every waking minute should be spent reversing the ill effects of my previous inactivity. A few days of denying myself any semblance of downtime --- after all, how can I possibly think I've earned the right to reward myself when I've screwed things up so badly? --- But now I've come to realize that an unconscious benefit I derive from these up-and-down cycles is the perceived pleasure I experience when I defy my internal taskmaster and play "hooky" from life and its responsibilities. It's a hollow gratification -- - not particularly pleasurable at all, in fact --- and at its core it's nothing more than self-created relief that I've given myself one more day's reprieve before really getting my act together. As Ideal Self glowers with disapproval, I assuage my guilt in the moment with the assurance that one more day spent goofing off or surfing the Internet surely can't hurt and then at some point I realize this is what exactly a procrastinators does. Procrastinators never just sit around and do nothing, in fact they do tons of other things that actually can wait (and get extremely busy doing them), but put aside things that they really need to do.

Well we’re all caught in the riptide of time together, getting one year older at the same pace. The seconds turn into years, vanquished with long hours on the job. There are no data analysts to tell us how we’re doing at life. No pie graph, no productivity charts, no online survey can give us a true reading. At the end of our life, there won’t be a summation flowchart that marks the high and low points. Procrastination assumes many forms: Glutting our brain with information and trying to meet the right people dwell under the banners of “getting smarter” and “networking.” Time passes with no judgment on our decisions. It won’t tell us whether we did the right thing or blew it. It does not judge whether we gave up or stayed true to our vision and dreams—only we can tell that. The years chunk on, and beginning to germinate inside is the feeling we get in the moments at the zenith of a roller coaster: We’ve crested the top and are about to begin the plunge downward. Everything is still possible. We can be the yeast of new worlds and create new situations.

We all are fearful falling back into those incredibly destructive habits: like having crap ton of studying for two projects and two paper due next week and have barely started; and it gets  more sever when you sit down  to work for it and your body starts telling you that you need food or you are sleepy. I know it sucks right! Those are the part of us (demons) that try to get us to stumble and fall off our proper path, and some are trickier than others. The demon telling us that there is no hurry is the worst. It has us think we’ve got all the time in the world, that we can spend today to enjoy ourselves and tomorrow to get down to work. It wants us think these things day after day, and in effect getting nothing done. It’s downright insidious and harmful to our progress as individuals, as groups, and as a species. Sometimes we got to make hard decisions, and then grieve, and then pick our self up and move forward. We never know what we might see along the way…

There is something graceful and flirty and coy about procrastination- a way of dancing with time, coming in close, and backing away. Two lovers teasing each other by delaying the inevitable. Well…. until we realize we have lost countless opportunities that could have blossomed had we not procrastinated. The best advice I’ve gleaned from my well- wishers is a basic truth understood by anyone who succeeds: to accomplish anything, you’ll have to do what needs to be done whether you feel like it or not. For a chronic procrastinator like me, that’s a bitter pill to shallow  but I’ve found that more I embrace the hard fact of life and put it into practice, the less I allow my anxiety, frustration and craving for immediate “mood fixes” to dedicate my actions in the moment.


Posted on: 2013-Oct-10