One of my favorite Canadian philosophers has written in defense of procrastination, or so it would seem. In the end, I think he stumbles around notions of delay and procrastination, finally arriving at the impetus for action noting that, ". . . I might as well stop putting life off for later. Because that's what I've been meaning to do, that's what I've been meaning to be." Therein lies his title, "meaning to get to it." This is profoundly important, I think.
I'm back! ☺ I've been hectically busy. Something had "to give," and that something turned out to be my blog writing. I hope that new readers of the Don't Delay blog this past month found lots to consider in the long list of posts already published and that regular readers found the break from thinking about procrastination as refreshing as I did. In any case, I'm back and ready to write. I hope you're up for the reading and blogging with me.
Currently, I'm preparing for a panel at the upcoming Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. I'm an invited respondent to a very interesting panel of humanities scholars (not psychologists or social scientists) who will be discussing procrastination. So, before I return to the psychological literature specifically (I have quite a growing pile of recent research that I want to discuss), I will spend the next little while reflecting on the panelists' essays and other humanistic sources such as philosophy. Today, my focus is on an essay written by Mark Kingwell (University of Toronto).
Among the numerous books Mark Kingwell has written, I personally enjoyed his foray into trout fishing with Catch and Release: Trout Fishing and the Meaning of Life (Viking, 2003) the most (ok, because I read that one, and I love fly fishing). Mark is a prolific, engaging, and interesting writer, for a philosopher (a well-deserved counter to the many slights he makes towards psychologists ☺). Like the philosopher John Perry (Stanford) whom Mark writes about at some length, Mark proudly wears the t-shirt of a chronic procrastinator, while producing more writing in a year than most scholars do in a decade. This is an irony that emerges in his writing in a number of ways.
I'm going to address Mark's essay in two parts. Today, I'll speak to his arguments around the "psychologizing" of procrastination as a problem. In my next post, I'll have more fun with his focus on graduate education as a context ripe for procrastination. In fact, as he writes, "Procrastination visits all manner of people in all kinds of occupations, of course, but there are good reasons why graduate school in the humanities is a prime location for it" (p. 365). Tempting as it is to focus on the plight of doctoral students, I'll keep my attention on the task at hand - Mark's thinking about procrastination.
On the surface, we psychologists (and perhaps readers of Psychology Today) should take offense at what Mark has to say. He doesn't seem to have much use for our perspective. He even makes fun of us in places. He argues that we're too "solution-oriented" or "prevention-driven" to offer a really deep account of procrastination, at least "deep in the sense we philosophers like." For example, he writes, "As all of its dedicated practitioners know, procrastination is far more creative than mere laziness, indeed is related only distantly to that passive affliction. . . Critics tend to view procrastination as the marijuana of laxity, a soft drug that leads inevitably to harder stuff . . . Anti-procrastination psychology, wielding its array of therapies and drugs and subliminal audiotapes, is moral reconstructionism plain and simple, a form of use-value propganda."
We psychologists are too busy trying to make problems go away, he writes, "rather than finding reasons why they can't." I'm not convinced that this is the case at all. As you'll see, I think Mark's analysis differs little from what I have summarized in this blog to date.
Despite these remarks that serve to separate the deep analysis of the philosopher from the simple minds of the psychologist, Mark and I agree on many things about procrastination, particularly: self-deception as a key element of procrastination, the similarity of procrastination to addiction, and the "war" that goes on inside the individual with desire and shame, often labeled a problem with the will. Most importantly, we agree on the deeply existential issues surrounding procrastination. For example, in his closing words, Mark writes, "And sooner or later, somewhere in there, I thought, like so many before me, that I might as well stop putting life off for later. Because that's what I've been meaning to do, that's what I've been meaning to be." Procrastination, the breakdown in volitional action, is about meaning, about self, about the courage to be.
Readers of this blog will recognize all of these topics from my previous writing. Where we differ almost doesn't matter, because much of Mark's prose is poetic and polemic, with clever references to literature and life meant more to entertain than to substantiate a point. Don't get me wrong, Mark's writing is erudite while being entertaining in subtle ways such as parenthetically adding comments like "of which more later" or leaving the "deeper lesson still waiting" as something he's "been meaning to get to." It's deceptively fun, provocative and wise.
Speaking of deception, let's get back to procrastination with self-deception. Mark writes,
"The whole point of procrastination's displacement activity is not that it's active but that it's displaced. The whole point. Procrastinators are masters of inventive self-deception, but they're also masters at seeing through, and so being unconvinced by, attempts at corrective self-deception. You can't fool a procrastinator into doing useful work just by displacing his displacement, dressing up avoidance as achievement. He's seen that one before. He practically invented that one."
You bet! Procrastination is an act of self-deception, and Mark acknowledges how deeply this runs in terms of self-knowledge. Mark writes,
"Genuine, or classical, procrastination must have less connection to the real job even while preserving some link, however tenuous, to its non-completion. That is, gardening qua gardening is not procrastination; only gardening as a way of not getting on with the dissertation is. This difference is subtle and often . . . invisible to the outside eye. Only I can know for sure that what I am doing is a way of not doing something else. And sometimes my self-deception demands that even I don't know, which makes things even more interesting" (emphasis added).
The subjectivity of procrastination - the fact that only I can know for sure if what I'm doing is simply an avoidance activity of another task - is a thorny issue for procrastination, leaving self-deception at the center of the story. If psychologists are trying to "fix" something in regards to procrastination, it should be the individual's understanding of his or her self. Again, as Mark so astutely ends his essay, it is an issue of what the self is trying to do, trying to be. He writes, ". . . I might as well stop putting life off for later. Because that's what I've been meaning to do, that's what I've been meaning to be." Knowing what YOU have been meaning to do, meaning to be, is the important issue here.
