Wait by Frank Partnoy

Author:Frank Partnoy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2012-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

Some people call procrastination a disease, a mental disorder related to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar illness, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sleep problems, and brain and thyroid anomalies. Not surprisingly, if procrastination is viewed so negatively, treatments will be designed to eradicate its presence and influence. But we don’t necessarily need to take such a draconian approach. If our problems are the result of high discount rates, so that we make decisions that leave us worse off, then procrastination is an evil and we should make every effort to stop. But often we use the term to describe behavior that is not so bad. Sometimes it is good to procrastinate.

In 2005, Paul Graham, a computer programmer, investor, writer, and painter, wrote an essay called “Good and Bad Procrastination.” He opens by saying, “The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn’t always bad? Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible.”60

Graham notes that when we procrastinate we don’t work on something. However, he says, we are always not working on something. In fact, whatever we are doing, we are by definition not working on everything else. For Graham, the issue is not how to stop procrastinating, since we will always be not working on something, and thus procrastinating. Instead, our real challenge is to figure out how to procrastinate well—how to work on something that is more important than the something we are not working on. In thinking about procrastination, Graham says what matters most is comparing what we are working on with what we aren’t.

Francesco Guerrera, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, learned how to manage his time by procrastinating during college. Not only did he develop the ability to write quickly at the last minute, but he learned how to manage a list of priorities, a skill he uses constantly to this day: “Now, most of it happens naturally. I have a bunch of things I have to do. The list of what I have to do within a certain time sort of forms itself. The other stuff is procrastinated.”

For projects that require different amounts of time, Guerrera makes separate lists. He describes a technique he and many other journalists use: “We have two sets of notebooks, a small one and a big one. The small one is for immediate day-to-day stories, the work we have to do right away. The big one is for big thoughts, features and stories that have some time. There’s an actual physical distinction between our immediate stories and the ones we can wait on. The physical form of two notebooks is our way of saying it’s too overwhelming to do both at the same time.”

Guerrera bristles at the suggestion that there is something wrong with his behavior. He told me he is really just managing delay: “This is not like traditional procrastination. It’s a way we form our priorities. It’s not that I’m delaying because I don’t want to do something.

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