by Jonathan Freeman

A few months ago I started thinking about how much I procrastinated. I believed, and still do, that I had perfected the skill to the point of artistry. I was and am a firm believer in the age-old maxim, "Always put off for tomorrow that which can be done today." There are just these days when I feel as if there are so many things that I can do rather than that which I must. Thus beginning the self-fulfilling prophecy of procrastinating.

Since I am currently a student and trying to finish a thesis (which by the way is moving forward at a newly defined glacial pace, thank you for asking) perhaps I am in a unique situation. To be fair it’s not like I am sitting around watching TV and eating potato chips in the hopes of becoming the world’s greatest couch potato, I am actually doing important stuff…like telling all of you about procrastination. As a side note of hysterical irony, I am turning in this article dreadfully late due to my own delay of writing a final product—a point that never ceases to amuse people whom I tell about this article.

I decided I would ask a group of random friends. The group in and of itself is quite interesting, including a few law students (some of them even going to such under demanding schools as Harvard and Columbia), a few high level marketing people, a couple of technology people who if found inattentive would have large numbers of people without working computers, an Outward bound leader, and a psychic and his assistant. A diverse group if ever there was one.

It seems, thank God, that I am not alone but merely one among the multitudes. The constant theme (reading between the lines) of procrastinating among the group is that we all seem to want others to think that we are busy. The effort to seem busy as well as complain about how busy we are certainly gives the impression that the key problem of procrastinating is that appearances are important.

The appearances I speak of, of course, are the fact that we want to be productive which we all assume means that we must be busy. This, oddly enough, makes me recall something a roommate of mine told me about the period in his life when he worked in Europe. He told me that he had never worked, before or after, as hard in his life but the purpose unlike in America was that the Europeans wanted to play. Americans seem to work hard only to…do more work. This could be our national curse that in our effort to always push toward the next frontier, to work harder towards that growingly elusive American dream and as a result we are all really getting tired.

But what does this have to do with procrastination? If you think about the amount of time you are actually active versus the amount of time that you say or even allot yourself to finish the task, I am willing to bet that there is a large differential of time between those activities. To that end, perhaps procrastination is a knee jerk reaction to the hypercompetitive situation we as individuals and we as a country, find ourselves. We all feel rushed and/or overcommitted and for those of us that may feel under committed we automatically and sometimes naturally go looking for other things to do in order to feel busy which many of us equate to feeling useful, such as writing an article on procrastination.

This brings me to my final point. One of the key concepts of procrastination that we all need to evolve out of, myself more than many, and that is this odd equation we have created that busy means useful. Granted there are plenty of people who need to equate busy with useful such as emergency room doctors and nurses or people researching a cure for cancer or AIDS but let’s face it, very few of us actually have these types of life or death jobs or even scenarios.

The bottom line is that we owe it to those around us and to ourselves to be a little more disciplined and steady. Remember the tortoise and the hare? But most importantly, we need to just get down and do the dirty of the task at hand no matter how painful. I think we will all find that effort begins to feel more effortless as time and task progress.