Giving procrastination a second look ...

Recently I came across an article in the Wall Street Journal written by Dr. Perry, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford University, is the author of "The Art of Procrastination," to be published by Workman later this month.  He mentioned that being a procrastinator is not bad at all… Why you say?

Here is what he has to say, a lot of us are feeling bad when we are ones or perhaps feeling depressed or even taking many advices such as don’t take in too many responsibilities or tasks simply because we may fail them. He advised totally different, in fact, take in as many tasks as possible because most procrastinators are ‘structured procrastinators” –we choose to be that way. We prefer doing something else than something deem more important but boring such as –doing budget or perhaps doing tax returns. So, the question is do we get it done? If the answer is, ‘YES,” then why worry about it?

In my humble opinion, when we are no longer meeting the deadlines or simply suffer consequences, perhaps it is time to look at how to improve your procrastination habit. Yes? Okay. Still not convince?

Here is his advice if you are a procrastinators:

• Avoid perfectionist – he said ‘avoid fantasizing doing things perfectly. Often procrastination is just a way of giving ourselves permission to do a less-than-perfect job on something that doesn't require a perfect job anyway.”

• Try not to be annoying to the non-procrastinators –in another words, admit it and work with them.

None of us are perfect anyway, in one way or another, we have been a procrastinator but perhaps the degree of procrastinating is the key. As long as we can accomplish what we want to accomplish and are meeting our given deadlines and are not suffering any consequences, why not! 

According to the author, it is worse if you are a ‘depressed procrastinator.”

He also mentioned a way to handle the common habit that turns us into a procrastinator in this modern world --sitting in front of our laptops and checking emails. How many of us happen to click a link and ended up reading some articles or perhaps surfing the net and at the end we haven’t gotten our most important tasks done and yet the time was gone. Now, are you a procrastinator? :-)

Well, he said that running our laptops from battery would help to break the habit --Oops! I am running out of battery, perhaps time to do real work :-)

There is one thing I find most helpful in dealing with procrastination --is to list of the tasks in hand and prioritize accordingly. It gives me a chance to see how much room do I have or perhaps how much time that I can procrastinate against certain tasks.

Hope you find this blog as interesting as I was writing it. –Um .. never thought I would give ‘procrastination’ a second look…

Until next stop,

Journey of Life