1. Confessions of a procrastinator
- Nature
- 469,
- 435
- (2011)
- doi:10.1038/nj7330-435a
- Published online
Everyone puts off big tasks with smaller ones, and the only solution is to fight fire with fire, says Fabio Paglieri
My work studying how people schedule various tasks over time (usually inefficiently) has shown me the error of my own organizational ways, and now I know the name of my terminal illness: procrastination. I am always struggling to stick to multiple deadlines on the most disparate jobs. For every project with a deadline that I manage to meet, there are two more that I am forced to postpone. I am a pathological procrastinator.
For some time I thought I was alone in my depravity, and I laboured to keep it hidden from family, friends and co-workers. Then it dawned on me: procrastination is no exotic malaise, but rather a pandemic virus, one possessed of alarming virulence in the research community. Colleagues never tire of mentioning 'bottomless to-do lists', 'overwhelming commitments', 'busy schedules' and 'pressing deadlines'. Such symptoms can result in students failing to deliver data, a co-author unable to complete a paper or a publisher postponing a manuscript's publication. Clearly I am in no position to judge, as I myself have committed similar misdeeds. I take some heart in sharing the guilt with so many others.
http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2011/110120/full/nj7330-435a.html
2. Structured Procrastination
I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.
