What To Do About Procrastination

Procrastination is the bane of my existence as a teacher.  I see it in my students every day, but as Terry Ellis, my former pastor, consistently quoted:

“There is so much good in the worst of us, And so much bad in the best of us,

That it ill behooves any of us To find fault with the rest of us.”

And so it is with me, the worst procrastinator of the lot, not a positive example for my students, or for my son or daughter for that matter.  A few days more and then I will plow through those examinations, just waiting on my desk to be graded.  Another cup of coffee, and then I will be ready to answer those emails.  I will wait to prepare my discussion notes until after lunch.  There’s still plenty of time before the next class.  Surely, those thank you notes can wait.

I always seem to find something else to do, other than the job at hand.  Quite simply, I put things off.  Even as I write these words I have other writing projects languishing in file folders and scattered notes, one project still hanging over my head for a decade now.  I have neat stacks of projects waiting to be completed.  I carry these stacks, along with my laptop, home from my university office with the idea that I will work on them after supper, and then I lug them back to the office the next day undisturbed.  My various projects are well-traveled, if unfinished.

I write off this procrastination to an inner tendency toward perfectionism, but I’m not sure if I agree or disagree with that unknown poet when he or she wrote:

“If a task is once begun

Never leave it till it’s done.

Be the labor great or small,

Do it well or not at all.”

And so despairing that a job will not be done well, I simply put it off for another day, when I can do the thing right.

A big thing must wait until I can really do it justice.  Little things don’t matter anyway.  Big or little, it’s all the same;  surely, the thing can wait.  But then, in the way of things, the little things pile up into a big thing.  I remember reading as a child the Julia Fletcher poem, a rhyme that alerted me, even in my child’s mind, to the fact that little things, taken all together, amount to big things through the tick tock of time:

“Little drops of water,

Little grains of sand,

Make the mighty ocean

And the pleasant land.

Thus the little minutes,

Humble though they be,

Make the mighty ages

Of eternity.”

In the whole scheme of things, it is after all a matter of priorities, I think.  What tasks simply cannot wait?  Must this thing be done immediately?  Well . . . I am in the middle of that engaging novel.  A few pages more;  then, I will hop to it.  In the meantime, a nap would be really nice too.