– 8 February 2025 –
Janus:
By this time, I should have already written some decent notes for Part 3 of my articles on manhood. But here I sit, without any notes, and without even enough energy or focus to spontaneously write up a thoughtful piece.
A few years ago, I would have cursed such procrastination and lack of discipline, but these days, and over the past few years, I’m simply swamped and beaten down half the time, and I don’t feel too guilty for my failings. Still, I could have written at least a few random notes and sketches, enough to provide some momentum to get started.
The fact is, I’m so overwhelmed with all of these endless, thankless duties, and I’m spread so thin that, more often than not, many projects and ideas sit around half-finished or never even begun. This really sucks, but I’m only one man.
If there is any positive to being worn out and threadbare with over-use, it’s that oftentimes this rush and bustle also stops me from committing sins.
Very often, I’m either too worn out or too busy to indulge those temptations that constantly crawl and swarm around my mind and heart like fleas and horse flies trying to eat me alive. I may want to sin, but often my duties make me miss the opportunities to indulge.
Hell, I still do fall into vice sometimes, but if I wasn’t spread so thin as I am, and if I had more free time and energy, I am certain that I would fall many times more often than I do now.
Yet stress and exhaustion can lead to other temptations. It’s true that I have less inclination or opportunity to fall into various curses and vices these days, but one sin that manages to flourish in a state of exhaustion is procrastination.
When I was young, I used to have a serious problem with procrastination. Then, maybe thanks to the military, I learned that it’s best to simply do whatever needs doing right now, if possible, to get it out of the way, or to schedule a reasonable and near-future time to do the task and then stick to the schedule. This is a discipline, like so many disciplines, that takes some vigilance to uphold, but once it becomes habit to get things done, then the mentality becomes much easier to uphold. The satisfaction of completion, along with the stubbornness to uphold order, win out.
But now I find that I increasingly procrastinate again, only this time I feel quite justified. I have so little time or energy. I have to let some things fall through the cracks, but then I start to willfully toss away important tasks. It’s a growing problem.
I’m so swamped, and so scatter-brained, that I may intend to perform some task later, but within an hour, I’ve simply forgotten all about it, and only after I get nagged or realize the failure, then I realize my mistake. And half the time, nobody even notices that whatever job wasn’t done, except myself much later.
Yet there is some use for the inclination to procrastinate, especially when one is swamped (as so many of us are these days): we can trick our minds into procrastinating about sin and vice and the temptations to these things.
For example, if I find myself tempted to get a nasty, curled-up slice of gas station pizza on my way to some job, I consciously procrastinate. I decide that I’ll get it tomorrow. And it’s amazing how, very often, the whim is so weak that I forget all about it later. When tomorrow arrives, I no longer feel the temptation. In a return to sanity, I can see that the pizza is disgusting. Or it’s sold out. Or I got too busy again and have no time for such nonsense. The urge or opportunity to indulge in a stupid, fleeting vice has passed.
With a little self-discipline, I can trick my worn-out brain into forgetting to indulge in stupid vices and petty sins, by merely deciding to do it later. Delayed gratification and self-denial are useful, learned habits that can bring pleasure by themselves.
Procrastination is just another habit, usually a bad one. With a little stubbornness, self-discipline, and a personal sense of order and scale, we can overcome the pathetic urge to procrastinate on things that we ought to be doing. Just get started, not even thinking about what it takes to finish, but not stopping either, and make this determination part of who we are. Nip it in the bud.
Yet this urge to put things off is a natural one. Isn’t it funny how we want to thoughtlessly indulge in a useless, pleasurable task right now, even it it’s something that requires significant time and effort, while we will put off the productive things, and dreading these often relatively easy things that we simply must do?
We can train our minds to flip this tendency to procrastinate around: we put off the stupid, useless, and vile things until tomorrow or next week, and instead we get started on the useful, productive things right away, not really thinking about their scale, just “getting the ball rolling.”
It’s amazing how, when we procrastinate on idleness and petty vice, how often we soon forget about them. It’s amazing how often, when we start the productive things right away, just thinking we might only do it for a little while, how we end up seeing the productive task through to the end. We create momentum, and in the end, we feel a sense of accomplishment and self-respect. And the job wasn’t so hard to do 95% of the time if we just stay on it!
I’m not perfect at this myself, and I can start to flag in my discipline, but I am determined to never give up, to never stop. When we’re exhausted, things can start to fly apart if we aren’t determined to uphold order and self-respect. I didn’t write enough notes for Part 3 this week, but I am determined to push ahead anyway.
This trick of the mind requires a stubborn and even obsessive vigilance and an aggressive sense of personal pride (the good kind of personal pride.) But tactical procrastination does work.
Even if we fail, we figure out a new angle, and we keep pushing on. If we never stop in our efforts, we always have momentum.
