A few months ago, a coworker complimented me on my discipline. It was a weird moment because I had always thought of myself as undisciplined, and still do a lot of the time (even today I put off starting this blog post for 6 hours….).
When I was in university I procrastinated essays and studying to the very last minute, sometimes even beyond it, taking late penalties because I wouldn’t or in my mind couldn’t start a project. I would avoid thinking about deadlines approaching, until a day or two before. Often, with an essay due in the morning I would be sitting in the library at 9pm with no words written at all.
I would watch my friends, roommates, and girlfriend start on projects in advance and finish them with time to spare and think there was something wrong with me. Everyone I observed seemed to possess an ability to properly schedule and complete projects. I felt isolated and somehow different. I gladly took on the label of a procrastinator.
The word procrastinator is thrown around a lot at universities. It is used as a label of a personality type. Someone who waits to the last minute to begin, or complete a project. From my experience people talked about it like it was a fixed characteristic or some sort of condition, something you are afflicted with, like blindness, not something you have control over. I heard advice on how to manage it, but never any discussion of procrastination as a response, or a result of some factors in my life.
Labels, like procrastinator, make it easier to understand the world around us. They help us pretend, or at least think of the world as black and white, as static instead of the complex ever changing world that we actually face. The label procrastinator means someone who typically does not allot themselves enough time to complete projects to satisfaction. The label saves us fifteen words, but more importantly than that it saves us from introspection into ourselves and from the follow up questions that would probably result from others if we described the actions instead of the labels. When I tell you I am a procrastinator it implies a fixed state of what I am, in the same way it would if I told you I am six feet tall. It implies something static and permanent, doesn’t inspire further inspection. When I tell you I almost always leave projects to the last minute and even then spend time distracting myself to avoid starting them, I imply that those actions have a reason behind them, and you may be inclined to ask why?
Why would you avoid thinking about a project in the lead up to it, and then have very strong urges to be distracted, to continue avoiding thinking about it and tune out?
Tuning out, or losing yourself in distraction is a stress response. In the face of stress that doesn’t go away, your mind will try to escape. It is natural to feel some stress in the face of a large, or very important project, but to feel so much stress that you shut down and tune out for almost every project you face means that you have way to much riding on the results of these projects, and you don’t see a high chance of success.
I was extremely stressed by essays and tests in university (a procrastinator), for a number of reasons. I was told from a young age that I was smart; another label that downplayed the importance of situational factors and implied, in my mind, a number of things. To be smart meant being smarter than others. Since it was a positive label it made me feel good about myself, I became attached to the idea. “I am smart” became, in my mind a permanent feature of who I was. So, to write an essay and receive a bad mark would make me feel like a terrible human being because it would mean the thing where my value came, being “smart”, one of the defining features of who I was, was actually not true. With every project, my value as a human being was on trial and that was stressful enough to make me avoid thinking about projects.
Procrastination had another benefit as well. By never working as hard as the people around me I had a reason to believe that I still was “smart”, I just didn’t try as hard. I told myself that if I did try I would have got as good of grades. So on top of stress making me want to escape, I actually had an incentive to not try as hard.
During university, I thought of procrastinating as being lazy, but now I see that it has much more in common with the more positively thought of, but comparably destructive label of a perfectionist. The procrastinator, like the perfectionist, views their performance as a statement of their value as human beings. They always look for the things that are missing from their achievements instead of appreciating what they have. The perfectionist goes through life striving and working for a satisfaction they will never achieve. While the procrastinator never strives because they are to stressed by the risk. They figured out that they can maintain the illusion of their identity in their heads if they don’t put much effort into succeeding.
People build associations around labels like procrastinator, and perfectionist. Perfectionism becomes attached to high achievers and success. Procrastination takes on laziness, and failure. The labels blind you from the reality of the actions these people are taking, and the things they have in common. The labels lead us to be passive, to define ourselves and others with labels that came from others and our actions in the past. When you think of labels in terms of actions, a perfectionist is someone who cannot accept anything but an unachievable perfection, they are driven past the point of good enough because they attach almost all of their personal value to the results of their next project. A procrastinator is someone who avoids starting projects as a result of the stress they feel because they have attached almost all of their personal value to the results of their next project. Removing the label allows us to see the commonality in things we thought were different. It allows us to understand and have more compassion for the struggles of others, and it allows for further introspection, understanding and growth within ourselves.
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