Southeastern Oklahoma State University
Positive ProcrastinationGenerally, I consider procrastination a vice, but occasionally—very occasionally—there is such a thing as positive procrastination. Sometimes a postponement strategy can help. There are experiments showing that people tempted by chocolate managed to avoid it by telling themselves they'd eat it some other time—a postponement strategy that worked better than individuals trying to deny themselves altogether. If a TV show is keeping you from getting back to work, record it and tell yourself you’ll finish watching it later. You might discover, once you’ve finished work and don’t need an excuse to procrastinate, that you don’t really want to watch the show after all. Vice delayed may turn out to be vice denied.A more dubious form of positive procrastination was identified by writer Robert Benchley, one of the deadline-challenged members of the Algonquin Round Table. (His colleague Dorothy Parker gave her editor at The New Yorker the all-time best excuse for an overdue piece: “Somebody was using the pencil.”) In a wry essay, Benchley explained how he could summon the discipline to read a scientific article about tropical fish, build a bookshelf, arrange books on said shelf, and write an answer to a friend’s letter that had been sitting in a pile on his desk for twenty years. All he had to do was draw up a to-do list for the week and put these tasks below his top priority—his job of writing an article.“The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one,” Benchley wrote. “The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he [or she] is supposed to be doing at that moment.”Benchley recognized a phenomenon that Baumeister and Tice also documented in their term-paper study: Procrastinators typically avoid one task by doing something else, and rarely do they sit there doing nothing at all. But there is a better way to exploit that tendency. I call this the Do Nothing Alternative. It was used by writer Raymond Chandler who was bewildered by writers who could chum out prose every day. Chandler had his own system for turning out The Big Sleep and other classic detective stories. “Me, I wait for inspiration,” he said, but he did it methodically every morning. He believed that a professional writer needed to set aside at least four hours a day for his/her job: ‘He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks.’”This do-nothing-trick is a marvelously simple tool against procrastination for just about any kind of task. Although your work may not be as solitary and clearly defined as Chandler’s, you can still benefit by setting aside time to do one and only one thing. You might, for instance, resolve to start your day with ninety minutes devoted to your most important goal, with no interruptions from e-mail or phone calls, or no side excursions anywhere on the Web. Just follow Chandler’s regimen and do nothing! Most folks will find doing nothing quite aversive and to avoid such a negative state will start rewarding themselves by doing something—like writing!Finally, it is helpful to always keep in mind the planning fallacy—a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimistic bias and underestimate the time needed. Many individuals consider the Sydney (Australia) Opera House to be the champion of all planning disasters. According to original estimates in 1957, the opera house would be completed early in 1963 for $7 million. Regrettably, a scaled-down version of the opera house finally opened in 1973 costing $102 million. BTW, I was at the opera house about 10 years ago and toured this wonderful facility but just couldn’t bring myself to attend an actual opera! I guess I’m just a good ole boy from south Texas who’d much prefer some BBQ (or Mexican food, or chicken fried steak) to an opera. I hope considering the planning fallacy gets you thinking about various assignments in our course. ................
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