Prema Jayakumar

‘Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday’. And most of us do just that, hurry along to keep up with yesterday and its tasks. Are you one of those people who have just to see a task before you to fall on it eagerly and finish it immediately? If so, you are part of a small minority. In spite of all the warnings, and the warnings are pretty fierce, about how tasks left undone haunt you and so on, most of us would put off till tomorrow anything that can be put off fairly safely. They tell you that ‘tomorrow is the day when idlers work, and fools reform, and mortal men lay hold of heaven!’
Still, we do wait for tomorrow when the task can be done much better. We are sure. Anything that qualifies as a task tends to get postponed. There is the column to be sent off, the visit to be made, the packing for the forthcoming trip to be done, a reply to be sent. Of course if it is writing a reply to a difficult letter or something of that sort, there is always the hope that, with the passing of time, it may not be necessary to write that reply at all! You tell yourself that delay might give you a clear idea of what needs to be done, throw a bright light on what is best done, thus saving you from making mistakes. The odd thing about this habit is that, you know very well that, except for the letters mentioned above, most of the tasks still have to be done, if not today, tomorrow or the day after that definitely. And with visits and other such activities involving others, delay might mean a problem.
There is the guilt of not doing something that needs to be done. So, you don’t feel comfortable relaxing completely. You don’t have fun, because having fun when there is work to be done, enjoying yourself, would make you feel guilty. The methods that a dedicated procrastinator uses to overcome this difficulty are innumerable. All the small tasks that need to be done, but don’t need to be done immediately, get done. Your iron clothes, you rearrange the books in the shelves, you dust the rooms that need dusting, you even write other, not so urgent, letters or reply to emails. Everything that had stayed undone gets done, other than the task whose deadline is fast approaching. You do not do the work that is to be done, you don’t enjoy yourself, so why postpone at all? If you finished the task you could relax. But you don’t. I used to think that it was a peculiarity that was specifically mine, until I got into conversations with other inveterate procrastinators and found that their reactions to tasks and even the actions they take are similar to mine. As I said earlier, a vast majority of people are like this.
It means more effort at the eleventh hour, but then, what are eleventh hours for? There is stress, since the task is obviously time-bound. You are willing to put up with all that for no reason other than sheer inability to do something at the earliest possible time. It is not caused by laziness or even an unwillingness to do whatever needs to be done. It is not even that the task is unpleasant. It is something you want to do. It is just that it is a pleasure to put it off. Isn’t it an odd phenomenon? Surely it is worthy of investigation by academics in the field of human psychology. It is probably another manifestation of the obsessive compulsive disorder showing itself in opposite form!
Shakespeare did an investigation of it in his own inimitable manner. The whole play of ‘Hamlet’ is an enquiry into the nature of procrastination. Only he could have written a play with a hero who cannot act without thinking and arguing with himself and generally putting off any action. All the incidents in the play take place not through the hero’s actions but through his inaction! But with tragic results, of course. It may be a warning to procrastinators, but one gets lost in the beauty of the poetry and forgets about the flaw of hero.
As a dedicated procrastinator put it, ‘There is, by God’s grace, an immeasurable distance between late and too late!’ Just as well, don’t you think?