No Sacred Cows

Procrastination has had a bad press for far too long. People who delay answering emails, leave paperwork untouched for several weeks, stare thoughtfully at an overflowing laundry basket or decide that the garden can probably survive another day are accused of laziness, disorganisation and poor self-discipline, when in fact they are often doing something far more sensible: conserving energy.

Procrastinertia: from pro, meaning ‘forward’, cras, meaning ‘tomorrow’, and inertia, meaning inactivity: the strategic conservation of personal energy for a more urgent task that may arise unexpectedly, thereby rendering all current tasks temporarily inadvisable.

From this follows procrastinertialism, the general philosophical principle that both physical and mental energy are finite and should not be squandered on things that possibly need doing now when something more important may turn up later. What looks like idleness is really the maintenance of reserve capacity. The technical term for this is the Strategic Energy Reserve, or S.E.R.

The logic is obvious enough. Suppose that at ten o’clock in the morning you consider cleaning the kitchen. The kitchen needs cleaning and you are perfectly capable of doing it, but that tells you nothing about what may happen at eleven. You may need to find an important document, drive somewhere, deal with a leaking pipe, take the dog to the vet or spend forty-five minutes trying to remember a password you last used in 2019. If you have already expended perfectly good energy cleaning the kitchen, you are starting the real emergency at a disadvantage, so the more sensible course is to leave the kitchen alone and preserve your S.E.R.

That is not avoidance so much as preparedness, and if no emergency occurs, the decision is not thereby invalidated. A fire extinguisher is not judged useless because the house failed to burn down, and much the same principle can be applied to three hours spent on the sofa.

Do not confuse procrastinertia with laziness. Laziness is not wanting to make the effort, whereas procrastinertia is saving the effort for when it matters. Lazy people slouch on the sofa because they can’t be bothered to mow the lawn; procrastinertialists repose strategically on the sofa because mowing the lawn would reduce the energy available for a more pressing demand later. If that pressing demand turns out to be making a cuppa, the system has still worked exactly as intended.

Deadlines are an area where the whole subject becomes interesting, because they have somehow acquired a status they do not deserve. They are treated as fixed points in time when in reality many are elastic, negotiable or simply optimistic. They move, they are extended, they are forgotten, somebody else misses theirs first, and the person who said on Monday that they absolutely must have something by Friday quite often discovers by Friday afternoon that the following Monday will do just as well.

This gives us the Principle of Deadline Elasticity, according to which no deadline should be treated as final until somebody has tested whether it is movable. There are a few irritating exceptions, such as court appointments or French restaurants that stop serving lunch at 2pm and refuse to feed you again before 7pm. But most of real life is far less rigid. Forms come with reminders, appointments can be moved, editors extend copy dates and administrative deadlines regularly turn out to have more give in them than the wording suggests.

Finishing something early is therefore simply premature energy expenditure. The correct time to act is when urgency and inflexibility finally coincide, because before that point the energy is better kept in reserve. Once that point arrives, quite extraordinary amounts of previously unavailable energy suddenly appear, which explains why something that has resisted attention for six months can be completed in one furious burst late on the final evening. This clearly demonstrates that it would have been utterly wasteful spending ten times as long fretting over the task before.

As urgency increases, several previously separate tasks may eventually converge into one highly productive burst, particularly before a holiday, a tax deadline, the arrival of guests or any occasion involving somebody likely to notice the state of the bathroom. Drawers are emptied, emails are answered, floors are cleaned, forms are submitted and objects that have occupied the same surface for eleven months suddenly acquire a proper home. The important point remains that none of this activity was required earlier, because earlier it was not urgent.

Procrastinertialism is therefore not an excuse for doing nothing, but a system for refusing to do things before they have made a convincing case for themselves. Energy is conserved, deadlines are tested, urgency is allowed to develop naturally, and action begins only when reality has finally removed the option of postponement, which is surely a far more sensible arrangement than exhausting yourself in advance for reasons that may later turn out not to have mattered at all.