Procrastination is a thing. Hell, I’ve put off writing this post more times than Greta’s smile has been mistaken for a cat’s arsehole. Everyone procrastinates, and anyone who claims that they don’t procrastinate is a liar as well as a procrastinator. So there.
I have a period of lucid productivity every week between about 0730 and 1400 on Mondays. After that, things tend to fall off a cliff and I am really good at finding lots of reasons for not doing things that I should be doing, and that if I did them would actually take far less time to do than the effort taken to avoid doing them.
I am certain that this process is familiar to a good number of you.
A young man that I know spoke to me the other day about his battles with procrastination. This kid has a degree in physics from Oxford university. He’s not a stupido. His battles with procrastination have convinced him that he needs to spend about a grand on getting an ADHD evaluation to ascertain whether that is his real problem.
I told him that he may not be a stupido, but he sure is acting like one. But his approach is typical of Gen Z or whatever the hell they’re calling themselves. As a Gen Xer, we understood procrastination as just being one of the necessary evils of the world. For instance, back in the day, if a firm hired a young man then they just had to accept that he would have a certain number of sick days every year that would always seem to fall on either a Friday or a Monday, or both. If he did manage to turn up to work on a Friday then it would have to be generally accepted that no productive work of any kind could possibly occur after about 1100.
What counted was how said young man was able to work on regular days, like Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays. If he could pull his finger out at those times then he was a good kid. This is what was known as reasonable expectations.
Procrastination is just wasting time. But time is a precious resource, particularly if you’ve wasted most of it watching reruns of Oprah. Doing shit like that drains your energy. Which is weird because you’re not “doing” anything. Read a book for an hour and you get up energised. Watch Youtube shorts for the same length of time and you roll off the couch like a beached whale that has overdosed on Valium.
Modern SCIENCE! has convinced a good majority of the population that examples of negative behavior such as procrastination are not due to being a lazy sack of shit, but rather that they are a victim of disorders such as ADHD, disorders that have been entirely invented by the SCIENCE!. With such a diagnosis in hand, the lazy procrastinator now possesses the coveted official status of victim. He can happily return to his procrastinating ways convinced that all that he needs to do about it is to pop whatever pills that the SCIENCE! sold him to treat it.
And so it goes. But if you are reading this, then feel safe in the knowledge that everyone is in the same procrastinating boat as you are. But many people, in spite of the procrastination bugbear, still manage to get a whole lot of stuff done. So the feeling safe part you can stick where the sun don’t shine. Get off your backside, young man. After all, it’s the main thing that separates us from the socialist scumbags.
Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can purchase Adam’s books here.
