Procrastination gets a bad rap!

Photo by Roy Blumenthal

How procrastination may be a good thing.

I have a proposition for you to consider. It’s not what you have heard from your parents and your teachers. In fact it seems quite irresponsible. It might give you a bad reputation. It might encourage people to doubt your commitment or your work ethic. But, on the other hand, it might just save you a lot of trouble. I’d like you to reconsider procrastination because I contend that procrastination gets a bad rap.  Sometimes procrastination is just plain smart.

Be wary of conventional wisdom

Everybody tells you not to procrastinate. They tell you to just dig in and finish those tasks that you really don’t want to do. They say you will feel better and save time. Maybe they are right sometimes but I see a different truth. I have been around long enough to learn that there is another side to procrastination. Sometimes  procrastination is nothing more than your unconscious mind telling you to watch your step. There have been many times when I have been saved from doing a lot of unnecessary work by procrastination about a task I really didn’t believe was necessary.   I was later proved right when I  found that the work was no longer required.  I bet that you have had the same experience. I am sure that everybody has worked hard on a difficult or time-consuming assignment or requirement only to find out later that it was not needed.   What could you have done with that time if you had only known?

The big problem here is how you tell.  If the task were known to be unnecessary then nobody would do it. You can’t control whether the task is needed or not.  But sometimes you just know that nobody will notice if the task is not done.  Sometimes experience will guide you to procrastinate because similar tasks have been eliminated in the past. There is a risk but the odds are with you. Other times the tasks are defined by you and your only risk is not accomplishing your goals.  Maybe that goal is not so important as you once thought.   So I ask again, is all procrastination bad? If you procrastinate and nobody ever needs the work, who loses?

Procrastination may be nothing more than good judgement

My hypothesis is that sometimes procrastination is simply the exercise of good judgment.  There are times when procrastination means that you are a lazy slackers, indulging your baser nature.   But other times , something tells you that a task is truly unnecessary.  You procrastinate rather than saying you just won’t do it.   Maybe you started a degree program with the idea that it would open up new job opportunities but in the middle of the program you discover that those higher paying jobs are a myth.   You don’t want to quit the program.  Nobody respects a quitter.   But you don’t want to waste your time and money on an effort with no benefits either.  So you procrastinate.  Maybe you decide to do something because society, or your friends and family tell you  that you should but you don’t want to do it and you don’t want the result.  You don’t want to spend any money or time on that effort. But you don’t want to confront your fiends either.  So you procrastinate. Or maybe your boss wants you to do something you know is a waste of time. You know that he will never actually need the work; he just wants the comfort of knowing it is there. If your experience tells you that it will never be needed and he won’t ask to see it, then you can procrastinate and spend your time on something important.

What do you think?

I don’t mean to advocate or encourage procrastination. It’s going to happen anyway. I just think that sometimes there is good judgment behind what we call procrastination. And in those cases, we either need to stop calling procrastination irresponsible or find another word for not doing something that provides no benefit.  At least stop beating yourself up from not doing something you really don’t  want or need to do. I’ll bet you have procrastinated. Maybe you also agonized about the consequences only to discover that it was never needed or missed. Or maybe you want to challenge my assertion that procrastination is sometimes just a signal to move on. I would love to hear your perspective.