Is Procrastination Thought About Wrongly?

There was a day. During this day, I realized I was procrastinating. I was playing video games intensely for a few hours in the evening despite having a lot of tasks to do but my mood was uneven since I was glad to procrastinate.

Whenever we think about procrastination, we have only one emotion: guilt and occasional anger. Why? Because we could’ve done something better instead of spending time doing leisure activities.

I don’t disagree. Yes, you’re right. Procrastination does indeed make us do activities we otherwise don’t want to and are often escaping from the task we ought to do.

But it’s also important to look at the deeper reason. Let’s say I had an English exam tomorrow but I was still procrastinating by exercising that evening. Am I wrong? Yes I’m wrong in terms of being effective.

While that’s the case, what if I did the same but I procrastinated two days before the exam? I don’t think it’s wrong. We often procrastinate not because we want to waste time but because we think there is enough time to waste. It may sound similar but there’s a huge difference.

I mean, is it really wrong to procrastinate if I know it would only take a day to study while I have five days left? What do you expect? For me to study all five days? I find that if you’re optimizing for being effective then it’s actually detrimental to do so.

Of course, we can talk about the difference between effectiveness and efficiency but that’s a different topic.

Our goal is to be effective, not to eliminate procrastination. Procrastination isn’t bad by itself, our intention is to reach our goals. As long as we reach it even by procrastinating then it is good to be done.

If we procrastinate then the underlying message can often be: I have a lot of time and I don’t know what to do with it but I know doing these leisure activities is fun so I will just do those.

This means that procrastination is not a problem of time management but rather task management. We procrastinate not because we are lazy but because we don't have adequate tasks to do in the extra time left.

This is where I personally found the idea of structured procrastination fitting. This idea essentially says that since we are going to procrastinate anyways and find pocket-size time periods where there is less work for more time then we can use these time chunks to achieve other tasks in the meanwhile.

This basically means that there are primary and secondary tasks to do. Primary tasks are important tasks that you ought to do compulsorily such as publishing a book which your livelihood depends on. Secondary tasks instead might mean reading a book to sharpen your craft which is important and does help your primary task but is by no means necessary.

Personally for me, writing the blog or studying for exams are the primary tasks whereas reading books to sharpen my philosophical knowledge is secondary which is preferred to do but also completely fine if not done too.

Food for thought.