There is an expectation for us to be “doing things”. Work is our religion. Emails, instant messages, and notifications our daily sermon. This can lead to feelings of inadequacy.

History is full of stories about famous procrastinators and the often extreme lengths they went to. My favourite story is Herman Melville’s, the author of Moby Dick, who reportedly had his wife chain him to his desk to finish his epic novel. Fortunately, it hasn’t come to those lengths for me yet.    

I’ve been reading a lot about procrastination - the act of delaying or postponing something. There’s no shortage of books, articles and videos offering all kinds of analysis and solutions, yet procrastination remains entrenched in our lives.

Pressure to justify our existence

Our current ‘Age of Distraction’ has magnified procrastination. There is an expectation for us to be “doing things:. Work is our religion. Emails, instant messages, and notifications our daily sermon. There’s pressure every day to justify our existence; to have a “side hustle”, to be “busy”, a feeling we should always be “doing something more”. This can lead to feelings of inadequacy, intensified by the perfect, pristine, and active lives being played out on social media.   

This feels like a suitable moment to revisit procrastination; to understand it better; recognise why and when it strikes; and how to navigate it.

A human design-flaw

Procrastination often feels like a unique, shameful, personal failing. Something to feel guilty or lazy about. Maybe it was the run you didn’t do this morning; the intention to meet with a good friend that got abandoned; or the new CV you failed to write. But procrastination is a human design-flaw. Every person wrestles with it. Recognising this, we need to be less hard on ourselves, and in the process, less despondent about the chances of change.

Psychologists and philosophers have documented many reasons for procrastination. I wanted to focus on four: fear of failure; fear of perfection; the conundrum of choice, and the “broken lightbulbs”.

Fear of failure

Fear of failure is often mistakenly interpreted as being lazy. We attach fear, or anxiety, to many of the things we deem most important in life: career, relationships, health. But we are so scared of failing in them, we don’t even dare to make a start. After all, if we don’t do something, we never need to feel the risk of humiliation or ineptitude. It’s why we often focus on the things that matter little to us; we can get on with doing these things quickly and they can even feel like fun. Meanwhile, the things that matter most get neglected.  

Fear of perfection

Fear of perfection is a close cousin of fear. It’s a cruel truth we all have two lives; the life we dream about leading (the fantasy); and the life we actually lead (the reality). We fantasise about every aspect of our lives, but we can’t live up to the impossibly high standards we envisioned for ourselves in the important task we want to take on: finding the perfect relationship; building the start-up company that changes the world; writing the best-selling novel. So we don’t start it to avoid those all too familiar feelings of incompetence or indignity. Or even if we make a start, the inept and amateurish quality on display horrifies us in those early results. We can all relate to what I call the “hideous first attempt” at something important; the disgust between our horrible efforts and the masterpieces of finished works we admire in life.

Conundrum of choice

The conundrum of choice is based on the view that life constantly forces us towards decisions where we have to make hard choices and compromise something. This was the thesis of the 1843 book, Either/Or, written by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. He wrote, for example, that one can marry and be constrained; or one can stay single and be free, but miss out on long-term companionship. And also that the difficulty of choosing means many of us spend our lives avoiding choice. We believe that by delaying choices, such as not quitting the job we hate, all our options seem to stay alive - the job could improve; a better job could appear; we could win the lottery. But it’s an illusion. Not choosing is itself a choice. And it can put you in a figure eight loop of misery. Think Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. 

What the Olive Tree can teach us about the value of waiting

When researching this topic, I discovered an interesting fact about the olive tree. The olive tree can take a long time to grow to full maturity, often taking up to twelve years to bear fruit. It procrastinates a lot, benefiting from a succession of long summers and extreme winters. They are astonishingly tough, and some olive trees are as much as 1,000 years old. The olive tree imparts a valuable lesson - sometimes it’s good to wait.

There are many important tasks we can’t hurry. We can’t make our children grow up quicker; we can’t become an expert on a complex subject after watching a three-minute video on YouTube; and it can take years to assemble ideas for a novel or new business. Speed and busyness impresses our society. How fast someone can run; how quickly someone can respond; how many tasks someone can juggle. But procrastination can serve a useful purpose sometimes, by allowing us to consider different ideas, think in original ways, and then come back to the task at hand.

The “broken lightbulbs”

There is another interesting angle of procrastination. What I call the “broken lightbulbs”. These are the little irritants that blight our lives. We all have them - something small and inconsequential we need to do or fix, like replace a lightbulb in the kitchen that stopped working last month. But we never get round to fixing many of these. Part of the reason for our inertia is our perception that these minor irritants are beneath us, and therefore not worth our precious time. We have an important, busy life to lead. We don’t fix the lightbulb because we can’t imagine our mood will be hostage to such trivial things. But the small things accumulate, and they determine much of what we feel. They nag us in their small, annoying way.

Five ways to get a handle on procrastination

So how do we get better at getting a handle on the kinds of procrastination that hinder us? Here’s five things we can build into our daily thinking and approach.

1. Fight the fear of failure and anxiety by taking the pressure off. Reframe the task from a terrifying ordeal into something we know how to deal with calmly. Get some perspective. If we aren’t successful at landing the new job, we accept it and move on, ready for the next opportunity.

2. Accept perfection is not an option. Learn to forgive the “horrible first attempt”. Accept and embrace its inevitability as the stepping stone to improvement. Leonardo da Vinci worked on the Mona Lisa for years, never finishing it, going back to make touch-ups repeatedly. If Leonardo couldn’t find perfection in one of the world’s greatest works of art, I think we can accept less than perfect in our lives.

3. Get better and faster at making decisions, sure in the knowledge every decision means missing out on something and accepting that sacrifice. Do your research, talk to people, weigh things up, then make your choice. Own it. Move on. Look forward. I’ve noticed the people who navigate life well are very good at doing this.

4. Be intentional in your life. Work on a mix of both the meaningful things and the “broken lightbulbs”. Minimise distractions and get into the habit of positive daily routines that are part of a bigger set of life goals. Spend less time on your phone. Much less.

5. Take the time to reflect and do this often: a long walk in the hills, a run at sunrise, or just gazing out the window. Give your mind the time it needs to provide the quieter suggestions and perspectives of our deeper selves. There’s a reason we get our best ideas and most important insights when we are doing simple things like taking a shower or doing the laundry. I got the idea for this article when washing the dishes.

Connect more with those closest to you

Procrastination has been with us throughout history. It’s a very human trait, and that means we aren’t alone in our battle. Far from it. In a world where there seems to be a misguided pride in being “busy” and a need to “always be doing things”, we should spend less time comparing ourselves unfairly to the apparent industry of others, and more time connecting face to face with those closest to us, sharing our hopes, frustrations, and contemplations in the search for finding those few meaningful things that bring value to our lives.

We don’t need to chain ourselves to our desk like Herman Melville, but we might still catch our whale.