The Genius of Procrastination

From the moment I sat down to write this, I let myself become distracted. I had the best of intentions. Call it curiosity. Call it research. Call it procrastination....if you'd like. 

Right now, I've got 7 links open on my laptop. (Mind you this is me 'taking a break' and none of these are work related.) 

One tab is for You Tube, which has been playing various performances by The Avett Brothers (Murder in the City, Bella Donna, January Wedding and 10,000 words...in case you were curious.) 


I've checked my bank balance, yep same as of an hour ago.

I've also found my way to Yahoo! News (what can I say, I'm a loyalist) and NPR.org in case anything new has happened in the world in the past 10 minutes. 

My fingers automatically begin to type "face..." as if being controlled by Zuckerburg himself. 

The crazy thing is while this is all happening, I don't realize any of it is happening.

At least not until mid-read of this NPR article, that I was quite excited to find, called "Getting around to writing: The art of procrastination." It's by John Perry, Standford professor of philosophy, mind you.

My heart sang as I read:

"The idea is that a lot of procrastinators are perfectionists....They're not perfectionists in the sense that they do everything perfectly...But when I get a new task, I often fantasize about doing it perfectly... You set the bar so high in this first rush of enthusiasm, and then you look at the bar and say, "I'm not going to try to jump over that.' And the procrastination gives you permission to lower the bar."

Could it be that rather than consider myself an easily distracted, information addicted, poor multitasker... that I'm actually just a perfectionist with a high bar for quality with a top notch imagination? 

What? You too? Then you should head on over to Perry's blog filled with articles on making procrastination work for you. 

I haven't read any, myself, but am planning on not only reading them, but writing an article (maybe developing a curriculum) about this great topic. I'll keep you posted.