Procrastination is only a negative if it conflicts with what we believe we ought to be doing.
Almost always what we believe we ought to be doing is a restriction on freedom because it is based upon social preconceptions i.e. what will make us liked, respected, accepted etc.
True freedom would be acting because we are self-motivated to act. It would be the spontaneous expression of genius - a vital response.
In addition, energy conservation is a function of any self-guided system. Procrastination keeps us from expending energy on non-vital activities. A threshold has to be reached wherein the consequences of not acting become great enough to overcome the natural energy-saving inertia.

Hi Will,
Thanks for taking the time to post. I want to engage the ideas you have expressed here.

I'm not sure I agree that "what we believe we ought to be doing is a restriction on freedom because it is based upon social preconceptions i.e. what will make us liked, respected, accepted etc." I might decide that what I ought to be doing is flossing my teeth, because it keeps my mouth healthy, or I ought to be eating more healthily because it's good for my body. Although these are socially-held beliefs, they are empirical facts as well. So, we could see these as true intentions of self that we end up not acting on.

I agree that we could be living in bad faith by accepting socially-prescribed "oughts" in our lives, and research indicates that socially-prescribed perfectionism is a correlate of procrastination. However, I hear from many people who are concerned because they are not self-motivated to act, never make that vital response, even to self-oriented goals.

Finally, I think your last statement confuses procrastination with any sort of delay. I want to keep the term separate from other forms of delay, like a sagacious delay that keeps me from expending energy on non-vital activities. Procrastination is a needless, irrational delay on an intended act even when this delay will probably have negative consequences. So, I don't think it's just a threshold issue of energy saving. These are just different sorts of things.
tim

.. like so many 'systematic' philosophers, Sartre had a significant insight, which he wrote about (good). He then erected an entire system on it (not so good). I think this extreme emphasis on freewill/dom is inevitably oversimplistic. What about Roy Baumeister's suggestion that 'will' is a limited resource? How free are we then, and how often?

Sartre marvelously described those moments which seem to be at the razor's edge of choice, when the whole of a life seems to be in balance (actually he was better on this in his novels than in the monographs). But to conflate those moments with the whole of a life is surely an error.

There's so much more to say on this, from so many angles (ask Buddhists who spend years in self-training to attain freedom if they think your average Gitane-smoking Left Bank cafe-dweller is genuinely free). But I don't think that, even from a 'mere' phenomenological perspective, Sartre painted a very fiiled-out portait of real human life.

CB, we agree that there is so much more to say. We also agree that there are limitations to Sartre's philosophy, as with any philosopher. That wasn't my point in the blog, it was to focus on how procrastination is an existential problem.

Where we disagree is whether Sartre's ideas, or the existentialist concepts more generally, of choice and bad faith apply to only the "razor's edge of choice." I argue that they don't, and I hear this clearly from people stuck in their own procrastination almost daily.

You're correct that Baumeister (and others) have demonstrated in an experimental context that will power is like a muscle, with their most recent work showing the depletion of glucose at the exercise of will power in their experiments. Last year, I published a paper with Joe Ferrrari (De Paul University) applying this paradigm to indecision in fact. However, this is all in an experimental context and lacks a great deal of external validity for the application to other parts of our life, I think. Certainly these data don't negate the notion of free will at all, just that the application of our effort willfully is limited; it has a refractory period of sorts. To the extent that our willpower is like a muscle (not really that surprising as all of this originates in our physical body, the brain), this is not really that surprising. We have limits. We could even argue that this is part of the "facticity" (the intractable condition of human existence) of which the existentialists write.

I'll end where you do, that there is so much more to say. It's worth reiterating that I'm not arguing for Sartre's whole philosophical system. I drew on Sartre as one of a few existentialists to discuss key concepts in relation to procrastination.

Good to have the debate, even if limited.
respectfully,
tim

I appreciate your podcasts. Can't often sit down and read but can often listen to podcasts while doing dishes, walking dog, etc.

yes. to do it now is the watchword. not to get into the lazy middle eastern rut of taking it easy and arriving at meetings two hours late when they are about to end. you can think it all or do it all. the choice and power is yours alone.