The Art of Procrastination

If I was to be perfectly honest with the world — and with myself — this is what I would say my daily routine looks like: Get up in the morning and worry about all the work I have to do. Start procrastinating. Take a nap to recover from all the worrying and procrastinating I've done. Build up some courage to do some real work. Run out to the store to buy some chocolate and/or take a nap to recover from actual work.

This might sound like I'm a lazy bum, (which might be true), but none of this is as easy as it sounds. It takes a lot of time and energy to be able to so efficiently accomplish such a large amount of worrying and procrastinating with so few hours in the day.

Sometimes, I think my big problem isn't so much procrastinating as it is having enough things to help me procrastinate. I can only walk the dog around the block so many times, spend so much time cleaning my house, logging into facebook (to see what other people are doing to procrastinate) or eating pieces of chocolate cake before I'm forced to sit down and work.. But, in some ways, the challenge — and the hope — is that if I can procrastinate enough, it will eventually lead to work. So, that means I need to stop procrastinating about procrastinating and just sit down to procrastinate so I can eventually start working.

When I do finally start working, I usually feel such a sense of relief that I wonder why I procrastinated so much in the first place. But the bottom line, I suppose, is that it's not so much a general sense laziness that stops me from working as it is the fear that I'll finish something and it won't be good enough, or — god forbid — that it will be too good and the next time, I'll have to make it even better.

A good friend of mine always tells me that procrastination is an act of self sabotage because you don't give yourself the chance to succeed or fail. “It doesn't matter if you succeed or fail, though, ” he says. “ You just do your best and try not to be so attached to the outcome.” I never know what to say to this. I mean, if I'm not attached to the outcome, then why bother to do anything?

I'm not sure what is the answer. Sometimes I think there's a lot I can learn from my dog who is not overly concerned about succeeding or failing and is not much of a procrastinator.. Whenever we go for walks, she spends the whole time trying to catch whatever crosses our path — deer, coyote, squirrels. And even though, 99.9 percent of the time she never catches anything, she never gets discouraged. The other day, though, much to my surprise, she caught and killed a squirrel. She stopped momentarily, looked at me for a second, bewildered, then dropped the squirrel and started off running after the next squirrel.

“Wait a minute!” I shouted at her from the side of the road. “Are you crazy? You've been hunting for the past two years straight. You've tried and failed thousands of times to catch something. Now, you've succeeded. Aren't you at least going to stop for a second and relish the victory?!”

My dog just looked at me like I was crazy. She was just too caught up in the moment to think about what it meant. I have to say I envied her for that.