Last week we posted a short animation showing the many ways in which we end up avoiding work. Since then it feels like everyone is in a procrastination state of mind.
First there is the book review for “The Thief of Time” in The New Yorker. In it we learn
what the Greeks called akrasia—doing something against one’s own better judgment. Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off.
And
Most of the contributors to the new book agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.” A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals.
Much of procrastinating is an inner negotiation about what should happen, and why.
The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing… . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.”
Brain Pickings, in the post 5 Perspectives on Procrastination, highlights points of view on procrastination “from the scientific to the philosophical to the playful.”
The Procrastinators is a series of 11 episodes of monologues about procrastination produced by Dutch artist duo Lernert & Sander. “Artists, writers and filmmakers talk about concentration, focus and the fine art of wasting their time.”
Clearly the many ways in which we procrastinate are universal.
