Procrastination

How to do it well

The School of Life, Alain Botton, Alain de Botton

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781912891771
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Many of us are quiet geniuses at the art of procrastination. We tend to feel so guilty about everything we haven't done yet (and the hours frittered away as though we were immortal), we never get around to reflecting on why we delay and how we might do so less o en. It seems as if we have procrastinated too much to deserve a new start. Far from it. As this book shows, procrastination isn't a weird affliction we alone have been cursed with: it's a fascinating and solvable design-flaw of the human animal. The goal is not to remove procrastination altogether (it sometime has things to teach us), but to understand its roots and plot a nimble path around it. This is a book about managing our procrastination, getting the most out of our afternoons on the sofa and then sometimes daring to get on with the most important tasks in our lives.

Renaming Procrastination

What we denigrate as procrastination might sometimes be more generously – and more accurately – renamed in very different ways.

In other words, what we do when we procrastinate is not necessarily bad; it just looks inconvenient at this precise moment and can be hard to explain to suspicious outsiders.

When it looks like we are ‘wasting time’, we are often at work on activities that are on the cusp of becoming, themselves, genuinely productive and admirable.

 

What it looks like I am doing:

Staring out of the window

How I justify this action to myself:

Giving the quieter parts of the mind a chance to be heard
Virginia Woolf could be seen doing this from time to time

 

What it looks like I am doing:

Lying in bed for hours

How I justify this action to myself:

Thinking, accumulating self-knowledge
René Descartes & Marcel Proust were both major exponents of this

 

What it looks like I am doing:

Chatting with friends

How I justify this action to myself:

It’s philosophy in action
Socrates, for example, didn’t actually write anything

 

What it looks like I am doing:

Making a snack

How I justify this action to myself:

Developing a new style of cooking
Just like Elizabeth David

There’s Enough Time Left

Until quite late on in his life, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant was regarded by his contemporaries as prone to wasting his time. He went to many parties, he flirted, he chatted away amiably all afternoon and evening. It wasn’t until he was in his late fifties that he published his first important book: a very difficult, but highly influential, treatise on the basic structure of experience called the Critique of Pure Reason. Over the next decade he wrote two more major works, the Critique of Practical Reason (which is about ethics) and the Critique of Judgement (which seeks to answer the question: what is beauty?) Together they established Kant as one of the great thinkers of modern times. Yet it had all come very late indeed (life expectancy for a man of his era was forty-four).

Johann Gottlieb Becker, Immanuel Kant, 1768

We sometimes use the fact that we have wasted a lot of time as a reason not to begin. It seems impossible that we could be more than halfway through our lives and yet still have a chance to pull off something important: start a family, run a business, invent a machine, write a book or build a house. Tales of late achievers are therefore of particular importance to the self-hating, self-doubting procrastinating ones among us.

We should not be embarrassed by the amount of time we have wasted sitting on the sofa. It has probably taught us a lot; it has left us with a reservoir of self-disgust we can use to fire our efforts; and it has brought us fruitfully closer to that ultimate deadline to ensure that we now have the motivation to finish our real work before our time is up.

 

 

Image credits:
Dublin City Gallery, The Huge Lane: Francis Bacon Studio, © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2018 / Triptych August 1972, Francis Bacon, Tate, © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2018 / Ford Madox Brown, Work, Manchester Art Gallery, UK/Bridgeman Images / Cherry Blossom Tree, © Jeff Hutchinson Photography / Sleeping, Orin Zebest, Flickr / Confidant, Kiran Foster, Flickr / Insideout grilled cheese, Larry & Teddy Page, Flickr / Johann Gottlieb Becker (1720-82), Emmanuel Kant, 1768, Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Marbach am Neckar, Germany.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Fear & Procrastination
• Squeaky Hinges
• Busy-ness
• Gazing out of the Window
• Losing the Plot
• The Procrastination of Others
• Perfectionism
• A Brief History of Procrastination
• The Distraction of the News
• The Distraction of Pornography
• Eating
• Existential Angst
• Psychoanalysis
• The Monastery
• Intelligent Eccentricity
• Deadlines
• Outwitting Procrastination
• In Praise of Procrastination
• Selective Procrastination
• The Limits of Hard Work
• Renaming Procrastination
• There’s Enough Time Left