Turning Procrastination into Creativity
Avoiding one thing sometimes helps you achieve another
I am a procrastinator. A habitual, inventive procrastinator. Somedays I don’t even get round to procrastinating. I’m that good. But I’ve discovered my favored brand of procrastination has an upside. I don’t avoid doing everything, just the thing I’m supposed to be doing. As Robert Benchley said:
“Anyone can do any amount of work providing it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”
Let me give you an example.
One sharp November morning I was avoiding writing a scientific paper. I went for a long walk. It would stimulate my mind (I told myself). I was shivering when I got home. I needed a warm bath before I was fit to work (I told myself).
The water lapped over me. I picked up Dani Shapiro’s wise, generous ‘Still Writing’.
“I have seen promising young writers discard their gift, shrugging it off like a wrap on a warm summer evening. They don’t care. They don’t want or need it.”
Shrugging it off like a wrap on a warm summer evening. I was electrified by this subtle, potent image of offhand abdication. How many relationships end this way. Before the tears, the rows, the desperate conversations. After the tears, the rows, the hopeless conversations. I found myself at my piano.
I don’t need you anymore
I don’t need you anymore
You’re like the coat I shrugged off on that warm summer evening
Autumn never came
I don’t need you anymore
I don’t need you anymore
You’re like the watch I wear on my wrist every day
I use my phone to tell the time
– – –
Sometimes when you start a song you know that if you can just stay in the moment you will finish the song. I kept going.
– – –
Everything has changed
Endless years are smothering my heart
Everything must change
I can’t stop from tearing us apart
Everything has changed, my love
Everything must change
Cos I’m not the same
I don’t see you anymore
I don’t see you anymore
When they tell me how gorgeous
you’re looking tonight
I turn away to hide my surprise
I don’t hear you anymore, I’m sorry
I don’t hear you anymore
You’re like the hum of an engine
The tapping of the rain
And I’ve heard it all before.
Everything has changed
Endless years are smothering my heart
Everything must change
I can’t stop from wearing us apart
Everything has changed, my love
Everything must change
Cos I’m not the same
Morning sameness
Evening staleness
Summer’s stifling
Winter’s bleak
Morning sameness
Evening staleness
Always stifling
Everything has changed
Everything must change
Cos I’m not the same
Cos you’re just the same
By the end of that ‘wasted’ day, the music and lyrics were done. The song, ‘Everything Must Change’, became the first single from my album ‘Answers No Questions’.
The procrastination sweet spot
Adam Grant popularised the concept of creative procrastination supported by research from Jihae Shin. Adam is, by nature, a ‘pre-crastinator’. He feels impelled to start a task immediately and finish it as soon as possible, postponement is agony. (There are people like this?). Read Nick Wignall for more on precrastination.
Adam thought precrastination a virtuous and successful approach, but Shin’s experiments showed that people who delayed starting a project tended to have more creative ideas than people who started immediately, or those that left it to the last moment. Adam has since taught himself to procrastinate effectively.
I don’t feel the interlude between conceiving and actioning is always procrastination. I tend towards screenwriter Aorkin Sorkin’s viewpoint, “you call it procrastination, I call it thinking”. And I agree with Tim Pychyl who says
“Procrastination is delay, but not all delay is procrastination”.
For me, it is when I don’t do the important task I set aside time to complete that procrastination guilt and remorse consumes me.
Procrastination and secondary creativity
Most research on procrastination and creativity centers on how they interplay with respect to a specific task. But I am more interested here in how procrastinating on task A can inspire creativity on task B.
People often ask me how I have time to make music. The answer is complex, but I have made a lot more music since I tried to address my dysfunctional procrastination habits.
A few years ago I got tired of the deadline panics, the guilt, the stress I was causing to myself and others. I decided I would do better. So I blocked out more time to tackle important tasks, and I forced myself not to get derailed by the trivial work distractions that fuel my procrastination.
This did help. But it also meant I gave myself hours to focus on tasks that did not yet feel urgent to me. This proved to be a perfect milieu for musical creativity. I suddenly had more quality time, limited but not fleeting, to finish songs.
Why, you might ask, do I not just schedule time to write songs. Sadly, this doesn’t work well for me. When I’m ‘on song’ the music comes easily, but I can’t force it. If I try, it scampers ahead of me. I limply give chase but only exhaust myself never catching up. It works better if I bail on everything to hang out with my musical muse, when it deigns to spend time with me. Which often seems to be when I ought to be doing something else.
Can you procrastinate your way to creativity?
Since observing my behavior I have started to wonder if I can control it?
- Could I deliberately cultivate procrastination as a creative stimulus?
- Could I trick myself into thinking I’m procrastinating on one thing when I want to be productive on something else?
- Could I harness my multilayered self-deceptions to find my personal procrastination sweet spot? A nirvana where I never procrastinate because I have rebranded procrastination on A as creativity on B?
Of course, it would be much simpler if I just prioritized and executed my work systematically and efficiently.
But, as most of you will have realised, if I was that disciplined you wouldn’t be reading this. And arguably I wouldn’t be human.
Everything Must Change is from my second album ‘Answers No Questions’ which you can get here
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