Procrastination Is Not Laziness
I’m sympathetic to but ultimately must disagree with Seth Stevenson’s take on procrastination, a topic I sadly know a great deal about.
Why did I subject myself to so much stress, instead of starting my work earlier like “normal” people do? Well, you’ve no doubt heard all manner of theories regarding the root cause of procrastination. Fear of failure. Crippling perfectionism. Abnormally low type-2 phloxiplaxitus levels.
I’m here to tell you that it was none of these things. The root cause of my procrastination, in technical terms, is this: I’m lazy. Extremely lazy.
Don’t judge, pal—you’re lazy, too. It’s why you procrastinate. When there’s a difficult, disagreeable, or tedious chore that needs to get done, guess what? You don’t want to do it. So you don’t. Until you have to.
It’s just that simple, my slothful friend.
I’m sure I procrastinate as much as Stevenson, but the thing is, I’m not lazy! I am in fact super-industrious. It’s just that I am always motivated to do something other than the thing that most needs to be done. Stevenson mentions Da Vinci was a flaky, distractable procrastinator. OK. But lazy? That’s retarded. Doing something else is not laziness; it’s misdirected industriousness.
No discussion of procrastination is complete with John Perry’s now-classic essay “Structured Procrastination.” You can even buy a “I’m not wasting time, I’m a structured procrastinator t-shirt!”
May 14th, 2008 10:40
“It’s not procrastination, it’s The Incredible Just-In-Time Workload Management System(tm)!”
May 14th, 2008 19:52
YOU might not be lazy, but many of us are. I procrastinate. Not to get something else done, but so I don’t have to do anything at all, except, maybe play MarioKart on the wii, or take a nap.
Doing things you have to do sucks, and so we minus you put them off until they absolutely can’t be put off any longer. Then we do them, bitterly, then get back to our regular, lazy, super awesome lives.
May 15th, 2008 09:44
Will, thanks for passing along the link to John’s essay. I hadn’t seen it, and suspect it might just change my life, eventually.
May 15th, 2008 10:25
Is my writing this hopefully interesting and illuminating (and certainly self-referential) response to a blog post in the middle of my working day industrious or just lazy?
July 21st, 2008 14:30
[...] A t-shirt every blogger should have, courtesy Will Wilkinson who argues (compellingly) that procrastination is not laziness it’s “misdirected industriousness“ [...]