Savouring the Flavours of Delay

It was a pleasure to be invited to participate in the recent panel on procrastination at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, particularly because I got to engage in a lively discussion, across disciplines, about my favourite topic. Procrastination has been my topic of research as a psychologist for over a decade. I’ve supervised many theses, published numerous articles, and co-edited two books on the topic. I also author a website, procrastination.ca, where you can access my “Don't Delay” blog for Psychology Today, iProcrastinate Podcast, or recent procrastination audioBoo (audioboo.fm). I even produce a cartoon strip entitled “Carpe Diem” with a friend who has the artistic talent that I lack. From a social-scientific perspective, I guess you would call me an expert. In lay terms, I’m certainly a geek that knows too much about a little thing.

Well, maybe that’s not fair to me or the topic. Procrastination isn’t a “little thing.” First, it’s an extremely common “thing” in our lives. It’s so common in fact that at social gatherings people who speak with me about my research usually volunteer as willing participants, certain that they are exemplary specimens. In short, this little thing we call procrastination is everywhere, and it seems to trouble a lot of people. Second, procrastination isn’t a “little” thing because it represents one manifestation of a whole collection of behaviours that we typically group together as self-regulation failure (for example, overeating, compulsive shopping, or gambling). Even without depicting this form of delay as a pathology, as Julia Wright and Theo Finigan argue we do, I still believe that procrastination holds no virtue. It is the unpalatable form of the many flavours of delay in our lives. Procrastination is that needless, voluntary, often irrational delay of an intended task despite the potential for undermining our performance and/or our well-being in the process. It’s not a good thing.

It’s important to recognize that all procrastination is delay, but not all delay is procrastination. That’s the heart of the matter, I think. In fact, just acknowledging other types of delay in our lives—necessary delays, inevitable delays, and, yes, even sagacious delays—is important in addressing the many ways that procrastination has been addressed in this collection of invited papers.

In my brief commentary, I draw on a few ideas from each of the contributors to address some central aspects of procrastination as well as some common misconceptions. Of course, given the brevity of my reply, my approach is a bit light fingered, as I have chosen those things that leapt off the page to me. Although there are so many other good ideas in these papers that I would like to write about, I have chosen to focus on three themes: 1) The motivational power of avoidance, 2) the tension between “utility” and the affective aspects of self, and 3) the role of negative emotions such as shame and guilt.

In the end, I think you’ll see that there is a great deal of agreement between us. We agree that delay is a necessary and important part of the creative process in our writing (in our lives). I’m just not sure that we need to carry the moral and emotional burden, misplaced as it is, of calling this delay procrastination. In fact, I think we need to become connoisseurs of the many flavours of delay and learn how to embrace and savour the delay in our lives (while shunning any notion of procrastination that is!).

Avoidance as Motivator

Theo Finigan, reflecting on his graduate studies and drawing on the writing of Mike Gane, acknowledged the “highly complex and at times unpredictable negotiations between productivity and its deferral” (6). Theo understands procrastination as a potential for action, not mere “idleness.” He’s not alone in this assessment. Steven Bruhm confessed, with some humour at the conference, that another overdue piece of writing got finished before his contribution to the Congress. As he writes, “Perversely, masochistically, shamefully, procrastination has that productive effect...