I. Some ways of categorizing procrastination: “just in time,” “miscalculation,” “imprudent delay”
When people talk about “procrastinating,” they often mean “putting off a task,” but there are many ways of doing that: putting off paying bills till near the due date, avoiding an unpleasant conversation, rolling back over in bed instead of getting up early to exercise, delaying preparing for class till half an hour before it starts, ignoring the big stack of photos that should be put in albums, answering all of my email rather than proofing an article, writing a conference paper the night before, delaying going to the dentist, intending to save money for retirement but never getting around to it, eating a cupcake and promising to start the diet tomorrow, telling myself I cannot do my taxes until I have set up a complicated filing system, ignoring the stack of papers I need to grade until they must be returned. All of these involve putting off doing something, but they are different kinds of behavior with different consequences:
1) indefinite delaying such that the task may never get done;
2) allocating just barely (or even under) enough time necessary to complete a task (“just in time” procrastination);
3) a mismatch between my short-term behavior and long-term goals (procrastination as miscalculation).
Procrastinating proofreading by answering email is potentially productive (as long as I get to the proofreading in time), delaying going to the dentist might mean later dental work is more expensive and more painful, and putting off papers till the last minute might reduce my tendency to spend too long on grading.
It seems to me that many talented students use a “just in time” procrastination writing process for both undergraduate and graduate classes, largely because it works under those circumstances. (In fact, the way a lot of classes are organized, no other process makes sense.) “Just in time” writing processes work less well for a dissertation—they make the whole experience really stressful and very fraught, and they sometimes don’t work at all. It’s an impossible strategy for book projects—it simply doesn’t work because there aren’t enough firm deadlines. Shifting away from a “just in time” writing process to more deliberate choices means being aware of other writing processes, and can often involve some complicated rethinking of identity.
“Just in time” procrastination sometimes goes wrong, as when something arises in the allotted time and so it was not nearly enough. Sometimes the consequences are trivial—a dog getting sick means I didn’t finish those last few papers and I have to apologize to students; my forgetting to bring the necessary texts home means I have to get to campus extremely early to prepare class there; I misunderstand the due date on bills and have to pay a late fee. But the consequences can be tragic: if there is a delay at a press, a reader/reviewer has serious objections, or illness intervenes, then a student may lose funding, a promising scholar may be denied tenure, a press may cancel a contract.
Procrastination as miscalculation, or the inability to make short-term choices fit our long- term goals, is the most vexing, what Christine Tappolet calls “harming our future selves” (Thief 116) or what Chrisoula Andreou calls “imprudent delay;” that is, procrastination as involving “leaving too late or putting off indefinitely what one should, relative to one’s goals and information, have done sooner” (Andreou Thief 207). This kind of procrastination (imprudent delay) might mean choosing a short-term pleasure over a long-term goal (going back to sleep instead of getting up to exercise), delaying a short-term pain (putting off going to the dentist until one is actually in pain), or simply making a choice that is harmless in each case but harmful in the aggregate (spending time on teaching or service rather than scholarship). Imprudent delay isn’t necessarily weakness of will, as it doesn’t always mean doing something easy instead of something hard; it might mean choosing different kinds of equally hard tasks, and it is only imprudent in retrospect, or in the aggregate.
Many books on time management and productivity focus on this kind of procrastination, and describe effective strategies for keeping long-term goals mentally present in the moment. Ranging from products (such as the Franklin-Covey organizers) to practices (such as David Allen’s “tickler” files), these methods of improving calculation seem to me to work to different degrees with different people under different circumstances. None of them works every time with every person, a fact that doesn’t mean the strategy is useless or the person is helpless, but it does mean that people might need to experiment among different strategies and products.
Imprudent delay, when it comes to academia, is complicated, perhaps because it so often not a choice between eating a cupcake and exercising. After all, even if a scholar gets to a point in her career at which she comes to believe she has previously spent time on service that should have been spent on scholarship, there is probably, even in retrospect, no single moment that she made the mistake. I can look back on a period of my career when I spent too much time on service and teaching, but I was asked by my Department Chair to do the service, so I didn’t feel that I could say no. My administrative position often involved meeting with graduate student instructors to discuss their classes, and I can’t think of a single conversation I wish I hadn’t had. I can think of things I wish I had done differently (some are discussed here) but I empathize with junior colleagues who carefully explained why they have taken on this task. And, as my husband will tell anyone who wants to listen, I still regularly take on too many tasks. But, I will say in my defense, I’m better.
Imprudent delay—failing to save for retirement, spending too much time on service, engaging in unnecessary elaborate teaching preparation—never looks irrational in the short run. Phronesis, usually translated as “prudence,” is, for Aristotle, the ability to take general principles and apply them in the particular case. One reason “prudent” versus “imprudent” procrastination seems to me such a powerful set of terms is that the sorts of unhappy situations in which academics often find ourselves are the consequence of the abstract principle (“I want to have a book in hand when I go up for tenure”) not being usefully applied to this specific case (“Should I write another memo about the photocopier?”). This is a failure to apply Aristotle’s phronesis.
Another reason that thinking of procrastination in terms of Aristotle seems to me useful is that his model of ethics is as a practice of habits, which we can consciously develop through the choices. We do not become different people, but we develop different habits, sometimes consciously. People with whom I’ve worked sometimes seem to have an ethical resistance to some time or project management strategies or writing processes because they don’t want to become that kind of person (a drudge, an obsessive, ambitious). Thinking that achieving success requires becoming a different person is not only unproductive, but simply untrue.
Martha Nussbaum points out that Aristotle’s metaphor is aiming: making correct ethical choices is like hitting a target. If one has a tendency to pull to one side, then overcompensating in the aim will increase the chances of hitting the target. Andreou points out that there are things about people have a lot of willpower, and others about which we have very little, “I may, for example, have very poor self- control when it comes to exercising but a great deal of self-control when it comes to spending money or treats” (Thief 212). The solution, then, is to use the self-control about spending money to leverage self-control in regard to exercise: meeting one’s exercise goal is rewarded by spending money. If, however, one has little self-control in regard to spending money, then trying to use monetary rewards/punishments to encourage exercise won’t work, since a person won’t really enforce whatever rules they’ve set for themselves.
A lot of people respond to procrastination with shaming and self-shit-talking, and my point is that those are both useless strategies. It’s more useful to try to figure out what kind of procrastination it is, and what’s triggering it (the next post).