Procrastination is the act of postponing a task on a recurring basis, with the particularity that this seems to happen unconsciously or involuntarily. A procrastinator is someone who genuinely wants to fulfill all his tasks, it is just that he seems to magically find some more or less real excuses to postpone them.
In the long run, this behavior prevents us from finishing our projects, makes us appear as someone not trustworthy and hurts our self-esteem by exposing ourselves to harsh judgments. It is easy to reach the conclusion that procrastination is a vice that we should eradicate completely. However, setting this goal could be self-defeating.
It is like a reflex action
In first place procrastination is like a reflex action, a by-product of our primitive instinct to prefer immediate reward over future reward, and you can't eradicate reflex actions only avoid their causes. In addition, although it is possible to win battles against our instincts, in the long run it's a lost cause, since it requires a lot of energy and willpower that we might want to save to use in other areas of our lives.
Its intention is to protect us
Second, despite its unquestionable negative effects, procrastination intentions aren't bad. Ultimately it is a behavior that seeks to protect us from a negative or uncomfortable emotional state. A quite commendable goal if you think about it, because seeking our well-being is something necessary and no one should have to get used to the opposite. Perhaps the problem is that their strategy is inadequate, because the well-being that we achieve in the short term is achieved at the expense of a greater one in the future. But that the strategy is bad doesn't mean that it's necessary to give up on the goal.
Attacking it strengthens it
Third, procrastination seems to have some pretty curious emotional tricks that make it immune to your hatred. If you try to attack it from a place of coercion and suffering, you will paradoxically increase your desire to procrastinate. Remember, procrastination seeks to protect you from precisely that kind of martyrdom and consequently it will appear as a reflex action every time you try to launch a campaign of this type against it. This is one of the reasons fighting it can seem so complicated.
The enemy is your attitude towards it
By hating procrastination you strengthen it, by controlling your instincts you wear yourself out and weaken, and by trying a different goal you hurt yourself. It looks like an imposible battle right? Well this is so only because by trying to eradicate procrastination what you are doing is fighting against a part of yourself, it is like wanting to cut off one of your arms, and nothing good can come of that, right? Above all, procrastination is not necessarily your enemy, but your attitude towards it. Actually it is possible to use it to your advantage.
An opportunity to know our interior
The fact that it is a behavior that happens almost automatically indicates that procrastination comes from something that happens deep inside us. So we can use it as a way to know ourselves and in particular to discover the state of our relationship with our work. Seen in this way, the idea of suppressing procrastination only appears as a lost opportunity to know ourselves, to measure the effectiveness of the methods with which we approach our work and to come in touch with the emotions that we have associated with it.
It is not a death-match
What I wanted to point out with all this is that procrastination is not so much a question of productivity and self-control, as of self-acceptance and self-awareness. Which means that dealing with procrastination does not have to be deathmatch but a process of self-discovery in which we learn to flow with work and turn it into a source of well-being, not torture. In future articles I will discuss in detail some of the strategies that have helped me make procrastination an ally.