Procrastination is not the enemy. Actually, it may be an incredible ally.
Procrastination is the act of regularly postponing our duties, 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 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 the 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.
Although it is possible to win battles against our instincts, it’s a lost cause in the long run. Because 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 adverse effects, procrastination intentions aren’t bad. Ultimately it is a behavior that seeks to protect us from a negative or uncomfortable emotional state, a pretty laudable goal if you think about it. Seeking our well-being is something necessary, and no one should have to get used to the opposite.
Perhaps the problem is that its strategy is inadequate because the well-being that we achieve in the short term is performed at the expense of a greater one in the future. But that the method is terrible 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. Try to attack it from a place of coercion and suffering, and you will paradoxically ending up increasing your desire to procrastinate.
Remember, procrastination seeks to protect you from precisely that kind of martyrdom. 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 impossible battle, right?
Well, this is so only because in attempting 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. 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.
Because through it, you may measure the effectiveness of the methods with which we approach our work and come in touch with the emotions that we have associated with it. Seen in this way, the idea of suppressing procrastination only appears as a lost opportunity to know ourselves.
It is not a deathmatch.
I wanted to point out that procrastination is not so much a question of productivity and self-control as self-acceptance and self-awareness. This means that dealing with procrastination does not have to be a deathmatch but a process of self-discovery. One 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 some of the strategies that have helped me make procrastination an ally.