Procrastination is bad. It’s to be avoided at all costs. It’s downright laziness. Right?
Wrong!
I suggest that we need to do a little bit more procrastinating.
Here’s why.
Too often in life we jump to solutions without knowing what the real problem is. We get angry or frustrated and lash out without thinking. “I’ll fix this in a hurry,” we think — only to make things worse in our haste.
We’ve all been there. Someone says or does something that makes us uncomfortable or angry. We immediately lash out. It makes us feel better for a while…but in the end we discover that the individual had a perfectly legitimate reason for their behavior…and we end up with egg on our face, because we didn’t think first.
These are definitely legitimate times for procrastinating.
Consider, too, those times when you just can’t seem to get going, you feel uneasy and out of sorts. You’re not sure why but something’s not quite right with your world. Natural tendency is to get busy and stop wasting time. But instead, you feel incredibly exhausted and say “to heck with it”. And, you lay down to take a nap. Your body is telling you that it needs to stop long enough for your brain to catch up.
Or, there’s that letter you’ve been putting off. Every time you sit down to write but nothing but gibberish comes out and we delay….and delay…and delay… What’s the problem? Most often in cases like this, we simply don’t have enough information. We don’t know what we want to say or where to begin.
This is the kind of situation that writers experience frequently. They call it writer’s block. Too often, they feel guilty because they’re not meeting their deadlines but actually, this can the most productive time in their writing project…if they would just procrastinate a little more.
If you’re experiencing writer’s block set the writing aside, do a little more research, clean house, read a good book, go for a walk. Give yourself time to let your subconscious mull over the project – even a day or two won’t hurt. When given half a chance, your brain will come up with exactly the right approach and the work of writing will flow much more naturally.
There definitely is a time when you need to take action. But the best solutions take time to germinate. A little procrastination is not necessarily laziness…Procrastination can be a good thing.