Procrastination and the Importance of Getting It Done

by Bill Tierney

In studies about procrastination one place that gets investigated a great deal is the college campus.  Students procrastinate and end up pulling “all-nighters” finishing a paper they should have finished weeks ago.  Professors procrastinate as well, but they tend to clean the house or read that article on-line that someone mentioned a week or two (or three) ago that has a link to another interesting article.  We keep clicking and reading until it’s lunch, or dinner, or bed-time.

Procrastination isn’t knowingly putting off things and feeling good about it.  Procrastination is a mental conundrum.  You’re not doing what you think you should be doing, which ends up stressing you out even more.  Most folks don’t enjoy procrastinating, but they do.  There’s a fun book out – The Thief of Time – which analyzes procrastination. 

Procrastination can be doubly troubling.  Because you’re procrastinating you’re not getting done what you need to get done.  And because you’re procrastinating you feel bad about it and end up questioning yourself. 

Academic life is ripe for procrastination because we have so many choices.  If you’re on an assembly line it’s hard to procrastinate.  The widgets keep moving and you have to deal with every one of them.  If you have to grade papers, but you also have to read that article that will help you write the next paper, and you have a committee meeting that you should go to at school, then grading papers can easily slip until the day (or night!) before they are due.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m anti-procrastination.   I’ve seen it kill academic careers.  I’ve seen smart students fail because they’re spending hours on Facebook rather than getting the text done.  I’ve seen academics procrastinate an entire summer rather than turn to their writing. 

I tend to divide procrastination into two frames.  On the one hand, perhaps you’re procrastinating because you just don’t want to do what you need to do.  If that’s the case, then counseling might help, and/or the realization that you’re not cut out for the academic life.  By no means is such a realization a failure.  Understanding what makes ones-self happy is key in life, and perhaps a positive result of procrastination is changing what one does.

On the other hand, procrastination may be simply that we have too many choices.  I don’t think it’s simply a failure of will.  Sure, we can increase our will power, but simply thinking that I need to improve my will power may only make me more frantic when I fail.  Instead, I think we need better structure and self-definition in our tasks.  I’m always making lists and trying to figure out how I can get done what I need to get done.  When I don’t have lists I can feel overwhelmed, and feeling overwhelmed puts me on the road to procrastinating.  If I recognize that when I break grading those student papers down into discrete chunks and that I can probably finish one chunk right after breakfast, another before lunch, and another before dinner – and voila! – I’m done, then I tend to do the task.

Structures matter.   And if I don’t break my workload down into discrete tasks then I’ll procrastinate.   I learned this lesson when I wrote my dissertation.  I found myself thinking “Wow!  I’m writing a book – a very big book.   This is impossible.”  But then I realized that a chapter was like a term paper and I’d written lots of them, and if I broke a chapter down like I broke a term paper down, I could figure out what to do and how to finish the thesis.  I’ve followed that lesson with most of what I do.