Ralph Carlson Blog

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I think maybe procrastination gets a bad rap. I don’t mean to advocate procrastination as a way of life. I just think that sometimes, procrastination is doing the right thing when we are programmed to go in the wrong direction. The El Nino explores the difference between laziness and procrastination and suggests that procrastination can appear constructive while producing nothing where laziness is apparent and slothful.  In general, procrastination is viewed as bad and keeping you from accomplishing your goals.  I don’t disagree.

But I have been around long enough to see that there is another side to procrastination. There have been times that I have been saved from doing a lot of unnecessary work when I procrastinated and then found that the work was no longer required.  I know that everybody has worked hard on an assignment or requirement only to find out later that it was not needed.   The big problem here is how you know.  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 nobdy will notice if the task is not done.  Sometimes experience will guide you to procrastinate because similar tasks have been eliminated in the past but you are still taking a risk the task will untimely need to be done. Other times the tasks are defined by you and your only risk is not accomplishing your goals.   So I ask again, is all procrastination bad?

My hypothesis is that sometimes procrastination is simply the exercise of good judgment.  Most of the time when we procrastinate we are lazy slackers, indulging our baser natures.   But once in a while, something tells is that a task is truly unnecessary and we procrastinate instead of saying we won’t do it.   Maybe we started a degree program with the idea that it would open up new job opportunities but in the middle of the program we discover that those higher paying jobs are a myth.   We don’t want to quit the program.  Nobody respects a quitter.   We don’t want to waste our time and money on an effort with no benefits either.  So we procrastinate.  Maybe we think that we should do something because society, or our friends and family tell us  that it would be good for us but we don’t want to do it and we don’t want the result.  We don’t want to spend any money or time doing it. But we also don’t want to confront our fiends.  So we procrastinate.

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 to do.

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