Procrastination

When Tomorrow Becomes a Strategy

Some people can describe, in vivid detail, the project they haven't started. They know its structure. They know the opening paragraph. They've already lived through the moment of handing it in. The only thing they haven't done is the work. If that sounds like someone you know (or like you, all morning), Jane Burka and Lenora Yuen's book is a long, patient explanation of why you keep doing this. It skips the moralizing that usually comes along for the ride on this subject.

Burka and Yuen are clinical psychologists who first wrote about procrastination in 1983. In 2008, after years of running workshops, seeing patients, and watching the internet do unprecedented damage to the modern attention span, they put out a heavily revised twenty-fifth anniversary edition. As they bluntly note in that update, avoidance behavior has increased over the years, and the internet is the single most powerful cause. There's too much information, too many decisions, too many options, and a quiet slide into what they call procrastination paralysis. The book's argument is deceptively simple: procrastination isn't a time-management problem. It's a way of protecting yourself. Once you accept that, you stop trying to fix it with planners and start asking the right question. What, exactly, are you protecting yourself from?

Procrastination as Nuisance, and Then as Nemesis

The authors start by drawing a line most readers don't usually draw. On one side is procrastination that's a mild inconvenience. On the other is procrastination that has quietly become the organizing principle of your life. Nuisance procrastination is the friend who shows up late, the report turned in the morning it's due, the gym bag that sits in the trunk for two weeks. Nemesis procrastination is the dissertation that's been "almost done" for four years, the tax return that sets off a panic attack, the relationship someone won't end because starting the conversation feels too final.