Pre-Crastination
07/09/16 05:26
You know that feeling you get on the eve of a deadline? It is a sense of near panic, assessing the amount of work to be done and wondering if there is enough time to do it. I get that feeling significantly in advance of the actual deadline. In college, I would complete assignments a week ahead of the deadline. I would hand in papers days before they were due. I would prepare for tests and then have to wait for the test with a bit too much free time on my hands.
I think that I have moderated some over the years, but I still tend to try to beat deadlines. I pretty much have my sermon in mind by Wednesday although I don’t actually deliver it until Sunday. I depart home early for meetings. I arrive at the church long before others. Although they know me well, I still kind of drive my family up the wall with my penchant for getting things done early.
There are some people that are so chronically late that you begin to tell them an earlier time than you want to meet. According to my wife, she has learned that when I state a desired time to depart, she needs to be ready about 15 minutes earlier than I stated because I am more comfortable leaving earlier than is necessary.
There is a name for this. Pre-crastination has been featured recently in articles in Scientific American, The Atlantic and Psychology Today.. Although those of us who exhibit the symptoms of pre-crastination think of it as a virtue, there are several aspects of this tendency that make it a less than desirable quality. Studies have shown that people who consistently beat deadlines and complete work earlier than their colleagues tend to be less creative. We tend to go with our first thought and don’t open ourselves to the wider range of possibilities. We justify ourselves by the fact that extreme procrastinators tend to be less creative as well. They finally complete the work in a panic that excludes many options.
What makes us annoying to our peers is that we have a certain smugness, especially about those who procrastinate. I remember this most clearly in relationship to one of my college roommates, who never did any work until the last minute. His all-night panic sessions disrupted my sleep. I simply thought of him as poorly organized and felt that he just didn’t approach his college studies with the required seriousness. I dismissed him and sought out a new roommate.
More importantly for those of us who want to understand the phenomenon, it is important to distinguish the things about which we pre-crastinate from those that we don’t. We aren’t consistent. I panic about preaching and complete sermon preparation in advance. That means that I take time away from other chores. In fact there are aspects of my work, such as cleaning my desk an dealing with my mail about which I procrastinate. I’m not better with deadlines than others, I simply choose which things about which to panic and which to ignore. It is possible that I simply modify deadlines for certain things in my life.
Like so many other things in life, attitudes towards deadlines require a sense of balance. Ignoring every deadline is not a good social skill, but neither is panic in advance of normal deadlines. The same studies that show that pre-crastination results in decreased creativity show that peak creativity comes somewhere in the middle of the scale, possessed by those who don’t panic too early, but also who don’t completely ignore the deadline.
Of course there are exceptions to every rule. The legend is that it took Leonardo d Vinci 12 years to paint the Mona Lisa. After four years of waiting for the portrait of his third wife, Lisa Gherardini, Francesco del Giocondo got tired of waiting and refused to pay for the work. It was eventually sold to the king of France. Meanwhile da Vinci berated himself in his journals and expressed all kinds of doubts and guilt over his inability to finish the work. The painting, however, seems to have been a success in terms of its eventual fame and popularity. The anguish and delays seem to have resulted in a work of amazing creativity and longevity.
Aging, I hope, is partly about gaining maturity. I am trying to revise my attitude towards all sorts of things as I move into the next phase of my life. One of the things I’m seeking to conquer is my pre-crastination. I don’t want to become a procrastinator, I simply don’t want to get too worried too far in advance of deadlines. I don’t need to show up early for every meeting. I don’t need to start running late, either, but I could benefit from learning to relax and allowing myself to adjust my schedule when normal delays occur.
I’’ve got a long way to go to become that mature. Recently, when on vacation, I decided that I would not set the alarm clock. “After all,” I reasoned, “I’m on vacation, I deserve to sleep in as much as I want.” However, in the middle of the night, sometimes as early as 1 am, I would wake worried that I might not have time to write my blog before others were waking and wanting breakfast. As a result, I would get up and write the blog earlier than normal, usually in plenty of time to go back to bed and sleep for a few hours. I wrote my blogs earlier in the day while I was on vacation than I do in my normal routine. That isn’t just pre-crastination, It is pure craziness. The deadline for writing the blog is completely self-imposed. No one is telling me I need to do this every day. Normal people would take a break from writing for a vacation. Normal people don’t wake their wives in the middle of the night with the obsession about writing.
One of these days I’m going to wait to write my blog until the afternoon.
But then I’m not quite ready for that yet.
I think that I have moderated some over the years, but I still tend to try to beat deadlines. I pretty much have my sermon in mind by Wednesday although I don’t actually deliver it until Sunday. I depart home early for meetings. I arrive at the church long before others. Although they know me well, I still kind of drive my family up the wall with my penchant for getting things done early.
There are some people that are so chronically late that you begin to tell them an earlier time than you want to meet. According to my wife, she has learned that when I state a desired time to depart, she needs to be ready about 15 minutes earlier than I stated because I am more comfortable leaving earlier than is necessary.
There is a name for this. Pre-crastination has been featured recently in articles in Scientific American, The Atlantic and Psychology Today.. Although those of us who exhibit the symptoms of pre-crastination think of it as a virtue, there are several aspects of this tendency that make it a less than desirable quality. Studies have shown that people who consistently beat deadlines and complete work earlier than their colleagues tend to be less creative. We tend to go with our first thought and don’t open ourselves to the wider range of possibilities. We justify ourselves by the fact that extreme procrastinators tend to be less creative as well. They finally complete the work in a panic that excludes many options.
What makes us annoying to our peers is that we have a certain smugness, especially about those who procrastinate. I remember this most clearly in relationship to one of my college roommates, who never did any work until the last minute. His all-night panic sessions disrupted my sleep. I simply thought of him as poorly organized and felt that he just didn’t approach his college studies with the required seriousness. I dismissed him and sought out a new roommate.
More importantly for those of us who want to understand the phenomenon, it is important to distinguish the things about which we pre-crastinate from those that we don’t. We aren’t consistent. I panic about preaching and complete sermon preparation in advance. That means that I take time away from other chores. In fact there are aspects of my work, such as cleaning my desk an dealing with my mail about which I procrastinate. I’m not better with deadlines than others, I simply choose which things about which to panic and which to ignore. It is possible that I simply modify deadlines for certain things in my life.
Like so many other things in life, attitudes towards deadlines require a sense of balance. Ignoring every deadline is not a good social skill, but neither is panic in advance of normal deadlines. The same studies that show that pre-crastination results in decreased creativity show that peak creativity comes somewhere in the middle of the scale, possessed by those who don’t panic too early, but also who don’t completely ignore the deadline.
Of course there are exceptions to every rule. The legend is that it took Leonardo d Vinci 12 years to paint the Mona Lisa. After four years of waiting for the portrait of his third wife, Lisa Gherardini, Francesco del Giocondo got tired of waiting and refused to pay for the work. It was eventually sold to the king of France. Meanwhile da Vinci berated himself in his journals and expressed all kinds of doubts and guilt over his inability to finish the work. The painting, however, seems to have been a success in terms of its eventual fame and popularity. The anguish and delays seem to have resulted in a work of amazing creativity and longevity.
Aging, I hope, is partly about gaining maturity. I am trying to revise my attitude towards all sorts of things as I move into the next phase of my life. One of the things I’m seeking to conquer is my pre-crastination. I don’t want to become a procrastinator, I simply don’t want to get too worried too far in advance of deadlines. I don’t need to show up early for every meeting. I don’t need to start running late, either, but I could benefit from learning to relax and allowing myself to adjust my schedule when normal delays occur.
I’’ve got a long way to go to become that mature. Recently, when on vacation, I decided that I would not set the alarm clock. “After all,” I reasoned, “I’m on vacation, I deserve to sleep in as much as I want.” However, in the middle of the night, sometimes as early as 1 am, I would wake worried that I might not have time to write my blog before others were waking and wanting breakfast. As a result, I would get up and write the blog earlier than normal, usually in plenty of time to go back to bed and sleep for a few hours. I wrote my blogs earlier in the day while I was on vacation than I do in my normal routine. That isn’t just pre-crastination, It is pure craziness. The deadline for writing the blog is completely self-imposed. No one is telling me I need to do this every day. Normal people would take a break from writing for a vacation. Normal people don’t wake their wives in the middle of the night with the obsession about writing.
One of these days I’m going to wait to write my blog until the afternoon.
But then I’m not quite ready for that yet.