Why Do We Procrastinate?

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 3:27 pm by Alissa Wilkinson

Why Do We Procrastinate? 2015-03-13T15:27:10-05:00 Alissa Wilkinson

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Writers are, apparently, the worst procrastinators, though they’re hardly the only ones. Procrastination is a widespread practice. (You’ve probably already procrastinated today.)

Megan McArdle is looking at the surprising psychological reasons for procrastination at The Atlantic, through the lens of writers:

This teaches a very bad, very false lesson: that success in work mostly depends on natural talent. Unfortunately, when you are a professional writer, you are competing with all the other kids who were at the top of their English classes. Your stuff may not—indeed, probably won’t—be the best anymore.

If you’ve spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are. As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good. Before you take to the keys, you are Proust and Oscar Wilde and George Orwell all rolled up into one delicious package. By the time you’re finished, you’re more like one of those 1940’s pulp hacks who strung hundred-page paragraphs together with semicolons because it was too much effort to figure out where the sentence should end.

Read the whole piece here – it’s worth it.

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