Procrastination

When Tomorrow Becomes a Strategy

There's a particular kind of person who can describe, in vivid detail, the project they haven't started. They know the 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 someone you've been all morning — Jane Burka and Lenora Yuen's book is a long, patient explanation of why you keep doing this, told without the moralizing that usually rides shotgun on the topic.

Burka and Yuen are clinical psychologists who first wrote about procrastination in 1983, then put out a heavily revised twenty-fifth anniversary edition in 2008, after running workshops, taking patients, and watching the internet do unprecedented damage to the modern attention span. As they bluntly note in that update, over the years there has been an increase in avoidance behavior, with the internet as the single most powerful cause — too much information, too many decisions, too many options, and a quiet slide into what they call procrastination paralysis. The book argues something deceptively simple: procrastination is not 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 open by drawing a line most readers don't normally draw: between procrastination that is a mild inconvenience and 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 of, the gym bag that sits in the trunk for two weeks. Nemesis procrastination is the dissertation that has been "almost done" for four years, the tax return that triggers a panic attack, the relationship someone won't end because beginning the conversation feels too final.