The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

 Procrastination¹ is very literally² the opposite of productivity. To produce something is to pull it forward, while to procrastinate³ is to push it forward — to tomorrow, to next week, or ultimately to never.

Procrastination fills us with shame — we curse ourselves for our laziness, our inability to focus on the task at hand, our tendency to be easily led into easier and more immediate⁴ gratifications. And with good reason: for the most part, time spent procrastinating⁵ is time spent not doing things that are, in some way or other, important to us.

There is a positive side to procrastination, but it’s important not to confuse procrastination at its best with everyday garden-variety procrastination. Sometimes — sometimes! — procrastination gives us the time we need to sort through a thorny⁶ issue or to generate ideas. In those rare instances, we should embrace procrastination — even as we push it away the rest of the time.

The Good: Creative Procrastination

We procrastinate for a number of reasons, some better than others. One reason we procrastinate is that, while we know what we want to do, we need time to let the ideas “ferment” before we are ready to sit down and put them into action.

Some might call this “creative faffing”; I call it, following copywriter Ray Del Savio’s lead, “concepting”. Whatever you choose to call it, it’s the time spent dreaming up what you want to say or do, weighing ideas in your mind, following false leads and tearing off on mental wild goose chases, and generally thinking things through. To the outside observer, concepting looks like… well, like nothing much at all. Maybe you’re leaning back in your chair, feet up, staring at the wall or ceiling, or laying in bed apparently⁷ dozing⁸, or looking out over the skyline or feeding pigeons in the park or fiddling⁹ with the Japanese vinyl toys that stand watch over your desk.

If ideas are the lifeblood of your work, you have to make time for concepting, and you have to overcome the sensation– often overpowering in our work-obsessed culture — that faffing, however creative, is not work.

The Bad: Undefined Work

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’re “concepting” when in fact you’re just not sure what you’re supposed to be doing. Spending an hour staring at the wall while thinking up the perfect tagline for a marketing¹⁰ campaign is creative faffing; staring at the wall for an hour because you don’t know how to come up with a tagline, or don’t know the product you’re marketing well enough to come up with one, is just wasting time.

Lack of definition is perhaps the biggest friend of your procrastination demons¹¹. When we’re not sure what to do — whether because we haven’t planned thoroughly¹² enough, we haven’t specified¹³ the scope of what we hope to accomplish in the immediate present, or we lack important information, skills, or resources to get the job done — it’s easy to get distracted or to trick ourselves into spinning our wheels doing nothing. It takes our mind off the uncomfortable sensation of failing to make progress on something important.

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The answer to this is in planning and scheduling. Rather than giving yourself an unspecified length of time to perform an unspecified task (“Let’s see, I guess I’ll work on that spreadsheet for a while”) give yourself a limited amount of time to work on a clearly defined task (“Now I’ll enter the figures from last months sales report into the spreadsheet for an hour”). Giving yourself a deadline, even an artificial one, helps build a sense of urgency and also offers the promise of time to “screw around” later, once more important things are done.

For larger projects, planning plays a huge role in whether or not you’ll spend too much time procrastinating to reach the end reasonably quickly. A good plan not only lists the steps you have to take to reach the end, but takes into account the resources, knowledge and inputs¹⁴ from other people you’re going to need to perform those steps. Instead of futzing around doing nothing because you don’t have last month’s sales report, getting the report should be a step in the project. Otherwise, you’ll spend time cooling your heels, justifying¹⁵ your lack of action as necessary: you aren’t wasting time because you want to, but because you have to.

The Ugly: Mind Tricks

Our mind can often trick us into procrastinating, often to the point that we don’t realize we’re procrastinating at all. After all, we have lots and lots of things to do; if we’re working on something, aren’t we being productive – even if the one big thing we need to work on doesn’t get done?

One way this plays out is that we scan our to-do list, skipping over the big challenging projects in favor of the short, easy projects. At the end of the day, we feel very productive: we’ve crossed twelve things off our list! That big project we didn’t work on gets put onto the next day’s list, and when the same thing happens, it gets moved forward again. And again.

Big tasks often present us with the problem above – we aren’t sure what to do, exactly, so we look for other ways to occupy ourselves. In many cases, too, big tasks aren’t really tasks at all; they’re aggregates¹⁶ of many smaller tasks. If something’s sitting on your list for a long time, each day getting skipped over in favor of more immediately doable tasks, it’s probably not very well thought out. You’re actively¹⁷ resisting it, because you don’t really know what it is. Instead, try to break it down into a set of small tasks, something more like the tasks you are doing in place of the one big task you aren’t doing.

Procrastination is, more often than not, a sign of a technical failure, not a moral failure. It’s not because we’re bad people that we procrastinate. Most times, procrastination serves as a symptom of something more fundamentally wrong with the tasks we’ve set ourselves. So it’s important to keep an eye on our procrastinating tendencies, to ask ourselves whenever we notice ourselves pushing things forward what it is about the task we’ve set ourselves that simply isn’t working for us.

1 procrastination   

n.拖延，耽搁

参考例句：

• Procrastination is the father of failure. 因循是失败的根源。
• Procrastination is the thief of time. 拖延就是浪费时间。

2 literally   

adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实

参考例句：

• He translated the passage literally.他逐字逐句地翻译这段文字。
• Sometimes she would not sit down till she was literally faint.有时候，她不走到真正要昏厥了，决不肯坐下来。

3 procrastinate   

v.耽搁，拖延

参考例句：

• Most often we procrastinate when faced with something we do not want to do.面对不想做的事情，我们经常拖延。
• It's easy to procrastinate when the deadline seems infinitely far away.当最终期限总是遥遥无期时是很容易延期的。

4 immediate   

adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的

参考例句：

• His immediate neighbours felt it their duty to call.他的近邻认为他们有责任去拜访。
• We declared ourselves for the immediate convocation of the meeting.我们主张立即召开这个会议。

5 procrastinating   

拖延，耽搁( procrastinate的现在分词 )； 拖拉

参考例句：

• Begin while others are procrastinating. Save while others are wasting. 当别人拖延时你开始。当别人浪费时你节约。
• Before adjourning, councillors must stop procrastinating and revisit this controversial issue. 在休会之前，参议员必须停止拖延，重新讨论这个引起争议的问题。

6 thorny   

adj.多刺的，棘手的

参考例句：

• The young captain is pondering over a thorny problem.年轻的上尉正在思考一个棘手的问题。
• The boys argued over the thorny points in the lesson.孩子们辩论功课中的难点。

7 apparently   

adv.显然地；表面上，似乎

参考例句：

• An apparently blind alley leads suddenly into an open space.山穷水尽，豁然开朗。
• He was apparently much surprised at the news.他对那个消息显然感到十分惊异。

8 dozing   

v.打瞌睡,假寐 n.瞌睡

参考例句：

• The economy shows no signs of faltering. 经济没有衰退的迹象。
• He never falters in his determination. 他的决心从不动摇。

9 fiddling   

微小的

参考例句：

• He was fiddling with his keys while he talked to me. 和我谈话时他不停地摆弄钥匙。
• All you're going to see is a lot of fiddling around. 你今天要看到的只是大量的胡摆乱弄。 来自英汉文学 - 廊桥遗梦

10 marketing   

n.行销，在市场的买卖，买东西

参考例句：

• They are developing marketing network.他们正在发展销售网络。
• He often goes marketing.他经常去市场做生意。

11 demons   

n.恶人( demon的名词复数 )；恶魔；精力过人的人；邪念

参考例句：

• demons torturing the sinners in Hell 地狱里折磨罪人的魔鬼
• He is plagued by demons which go back to his traumatic childhood. 他为心魔所困扰，那可追溯至他饱受创伤的童年。 来自《简明英汉词典》

12 thoroughly   

adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地

参考例句：

• The soil must be thoroughly turned over before planting.一定要先把土地深翻一遍再下种。
• The soldiers have been thoroughly instructed in the care of their weapons.士兵们都系统地接受过保护武器的训练。

13 specified   

adj.特定的

参考例句：

• The architect specified oak for the wood trim. 那位建筑师指定用橡木做木饰条。
• It is generated by some specified means. 这是由某些未加说明的方法产生的。

14 inputs   

n.输入( input的名词复数 )；投入；输入端；输入的数据v.把…输入电脑( input的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• Uncheck the inputs checked for optimization in the previous stage. 不测试那些已经测试过的优化了的以前步骤的inputs.（变量参数）。 来自互联网
• Just in case, save in a file the inputs obtained at the previous stage. 以防万一，保存以前步骤获得的inputs（变量参数值）到一个文件中去。 来自互联网

15 justifying   

证明…有理( justify的现在分词 )； 为…辩护； 对…作出解释； 为…辩解（或辩护）

参考例句：

• He admitted it without justifying it. 他不加辩解地承认这个想法。
• The fellow-travellers'service usually consisted of justifying all the tergiversations of Soviet intenal and foreign policy. 同路人的服务通常包括对苏联国内外政策中一切互相矛盾之处进行辩护。

16 aggregates   

数( aggregate的名词复数 )； 总计； 骨料； 集料（可成混凝土或修路等用的）

参考例句：

• Snowflakes are loose aggregates of ice crystals. 雪花是冰晶的松散凝结。
• Our airplanes based in Europe should be included in the aggregates. 我们驻欧飞机应包括在总数内。

17 actively   

adv.积极地，勤奋地

参考例句：

• During this period all the students were actively participating.在这节课中所有的学生都积极参加。
• We are actively intervening to settle a quarrel.我们正在积极调解争执。