In Praise of Procrastination
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It has come to my attention during this period of lockdown that we are a family of procrastinators. Oh, the plans we made when this all started! The projects we sketched out! The personal enrichment activities we imagined!
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like we haven’t started any of these projects. We’ve started all of them with high-octane energy, enthusiasm and ambition. It’s just that when it comes to committing time every day to finishing a task, we are collectively useless. We joke that we are the “Gonna Clarkes” (my husband’s surname).
Our daughters started painting the doors of the garden shed to turn it into a sesh shed for vetted teenagers when lockdown is lifted. The first coat of white paint was a doddle. Then they started drawing wonderfully wacky figures on the doors. They even started painting those creatures. But that was several weeks ago and the doors are still mainly white with the pencil sketches fading a little more each day.
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I said I would sort the loft. I did spend an hour or so up there, moving the plastic boxes of souvenirs (I am a terrible hoarder and I hoard for others too) so that each person now has a stack of at least four boxes under the eaves. I did not open any of the boxes because then I might have to consider throwing things away, and I really need 30 old copies of Vanity Fair from the mid-90s.
I said I would sort our photos. I bought a scrapbook and one of those photo display gallery thingies that you hang on a door. Both are still in their plastic coverings in the spare room, where the bed is now covered with albums and scores of loose photos, of dubious quality, taken in different African countries in the days before iPhones.
I resolved to get to grips with my fourth novel and put down some serious words. To be fair, I have done some writing over the past eight weeks. However, I have also done more baking than ever before. Ever before in my whole life. That’s three full cakes, if you’re counting.
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(To be fair, the girls decorated this cake)
“Ooh, you’re baking again,” my daughter said as I whipped up the mixture for a lemon drizzle cake this morning.
“Yes,” I said. “Only because I don’t want to write. This is next-level procrastination.”
“I respect that,” she said, nodding her head gravely.
This daughter considers procrastination an art form. She recently explained, at length, that putting off doing her online homework for two weeks means that she avoids two weeks of stress. Instead, she does the work in a frenzy over two days, which to her mind is a much better use of time. She could be onto something.
The other daughter said she would make us all masks after I tried to buy some on Amazon and realised they would arrive in time for Christmas, possibly. She made two but then seemed to stall, which leads me to conclude that two members of the family are deemed expendable. I wonder which two. It’s the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.
My husband decided to tackle the garden and he has, to be fair, made great progress. But after a burst of activity, work intervened and now, on his breaks, he sits on the terrace, gazing morosely at the still untamed verges and sighs that there is still so much to do.
“Look, I weeded that area the other day,” he wailed. “And now the weeds are back.”
“It’s like housework,” I told him, totally not trying to make a point. “You do it and then you just have to do it again. And again. And again.”
“I suppose it’s a marathon rather than a sprint,” he concluded glumly.
And I think he might, once again, have hit the nail on the head.
In the Days Before Lockdown, procrastination had a bad rep because we assumed that we needed to get tasks done. Get Them Finished. Tick Them Off. But maybe we’ve been grasping the wrong end of the stick. With all this time on our hands, maybe the name of the game is to keep those projects going, to do them when we are inspired, to allow ourselves to be driven by joy rather than duty.
Maybe one day, the girls will feel like painting the shed again but maybe today they just want to read or watch Gilmore Girls or lie in bed staring at the ceiling and listening to their Sad playlist on Spotify. Maybe, I won’t get that novel written during lockdown and maybe today, I feel like trying out a recipe for carrot cake or snooping around the loft a bit more, or flicking through my photos again (not organising them, but remembering).
It’s hard for me to embrace procrastination. Not least because I want this novel — the enfant terrible of my short writing career, without a doubt — done. I want the words down and I want to be at that wonderfully exciting stage of submitting it for others’ opinions. I want this because I want to know that I can do it. Again.
It’s been a while since my last book was published (2018) and my fourth one has already had several difficult births. I want to get to the end to prove to myself that I can get to the end. But the fear of failure can paralyse. Hence the procrastination and the admittedly delicious side-effect of feeling that I’ve finally grown up and become a proper mother who bakes cakes from scratch. I’ll be arranging flowers next.
Putting things off to another time is only a bad thing if you have a limited amount of time. Lockdown has put limits on our lives. But it has also provided some of us, the lucky ones, with a sense of unlimited time stretching ahead of us like a gently meandering path, not necessarily going anywhere but offering a delightful journey through interesting landscapes. For once, we don’t need to race along the path, rushing to the next stop on our journey. We can stop and rest and start again, when we feel like it.
I don’t like to think of myself as a procrastinator but maybe it’s time to ditch that negativity and embrace procrastination as a necessary part of life and of the creative process. To see procrastination as an action rather than inaction. As a benefactor rather than a thief of time.
