The Procrastinatative Ideal

Sure, procrastinatative can be a word...

The title sounds sort of oxymoronic, how can procrastination be ideal for anyone? Well, as I covered some of the aspects of my procrastination already I won't get to case specific but there is an aspect that is interesting to look at.

Procrastination promotes intuitive thinking, or unthinking, by forcing me to do tasks involved in a project under a shorter time frame than most would find comfortable. I know that I have started certain projects and found that the project is large enough that the sheer scope of the work is imposing enough to stop me in my tracks... I cannot get started as I may not know exactly where to start, how to organize myself and the related material or perhaps I have many ideas and cannot pick which to settle on.

Once I get down to it with what feels like enough time left, various ideas become one or two primary ones and the first step is immediately apparent. It all just comes to me and everything flows and just feels right and my time sense is typically pretty close. Organization is no longer an issue as I find and apply resources and materials as needed while scrapping useless and irrelevant stuff.

Now the ideal would be to be able to do this long before the deadline as I do realize that other unexpected stuff could come up making it impossible to complete the intended project... or something vital is just missing. Although the only times that I can recall this actually happening I ended up either not needing to do what I originally set out to do or the unexpected was more important and I found that my deadline was more flexible once my true priorities were set in place.

It's not so much the procrastinating, but the pushing the edge once the crunch is on, it's that space where everything flows that is the real draw. Of course there is the time not wasted doing tasks or chasing ideas that are not really useful.

Having said all that I am not aiming to keep procrastinating, just reflecting on how it has been useful to me over the years, more or less, by default. My preference is to apply the same skills that I have developed, intuition, organization and focus, in order to complete projects without the tight time lines.

Jeff.