Productive Procrastination

For the last 10 years, everything I’ve done that was worth doing has been done when I should have been doing something else.

Academics are often asked to admire the kind of writer who, after finishing the last sentence of a 500-page manuscript, takes a sip of coffee, inhales deeply, and begins writing the first sentence of the next book.

“Work! For the night cometh.”

The academic life sometimes suggests 17th-century Puritanism. We learn early that we must publish immediately and continually. There is no release from guilt. Sinners all, we are disgracefully underproductive. We meet each other at conferences and are ashamed of the work we have not done. When someone else is blessed by success, it reminds us that we are not among the elect, and may never be.

“My new book came out last month. Seen the poster? How’s your book coming along (loser)?”

I used to have a picture of Benjamin Franklin in my office. Franklin was born in poverty and obscurity, but he became the most famous American of his time. He reminded me to rise early, waste no time, work late, and take no pleasure in idle entertainments. Franklin’s father -- who warned him that “poets were generally beggars” -- used to recite this proverb:

The Protestant work ethic that shapes the academic soul believes in meritocracy. The cream will rise to the top. If you are not a success, as the profession measures it, you have no one to blame but yourself.

But most professors also know the story of James Gatz, better known as the “Great Gatsby” of Fitzgerald’s novel. As a boy, he too followed the path blazed by Old Daddy Franklin. Denied the affections of Daisy, his “Golden Girl,” Gatsby attained all the accoutrements of wealth, but he remained unable to crack the social boundaries of East Egg. Gatsby was a bounder and bootlegger, but his tragedy is more moving, by far, than the self-satisfied winners of our cultural history:

It is better, in my view, to leave some goals unattained, and some debts never paid. I’ve never quite trusted writers who set out to become the motivators of other writers. Slogans come too easily to them. They believe too strongly in autonomy. The drive to not procrastinate, to eliminate all of one’s obligations (“neither a borrower nor a lender be”), is to embrace an idea of perfection and freedom that is unreachable.

“You too can touch the face of God, if only you buy my book and listen to my tapes.”

Procrastinators, on the other hand, are humble. They live as mendicants instead of hucksters. They recognize life’s limitations; instead of presenting themselves as exemplars, they begin every exchange with a plea for forgiveness.

“I’m sorry I’m late. Here is the work I promised. I hope you like it.”

If anything, the literary world needs more people whose habitual expression is “mea culpa” rather than “tua culpa.”

The romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a procrastinator of the first order. His publishers were always nagging him for overdue manuscripts. Most famously, he was interrupted while writing “Kubla Khan,” by someone knocking at his door. He never regained his concentration, and the poem remains an evocative fragment. But it is hard to deny that the unfinished “Kubla Khan” is a more stirring instance of romanticism than, say, the whole of Wordsworth’s Prelude, a finished poem that goes on for hundreds of tedious pages.

Melville shows us what can happen to people who always pursue the most daunting task instead of casting about for something easier. The White Whale is a metaphor for the blank page, which writers hunt obsessively with our harpoon-pens. Moby-Dick would have ended differently if Ahab had lost himself in the pursuit of whale oil or the search for The Rachel’s missing children. A monomaniacal, Calvinist “isolato” is not necessarily a better model for the writerly life than the louche, remorseful “inspirato” that Coleridge was.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a great procrastinator. There was always something to be done before getting about the business of killing his father’s murderer. But can anyone deny that Hamlet performed an honorable service in dispatching that pedantic spouter of aphorisms, Polonius? Perhaps things would have worked out better for Hamlet and Denmark if he had never got around to killing Claudius, if he had procrastinated until the old poisoner succumbed to cirrhosis.

As Hamlet shows us, procrastination can be highly productive, provided one has plenty of things to do while working toward the most dreaded task.

I, for example, always like to have one writing assignment that I am not doing but actively working toward like a man shoveling his driveway. That method makes me respectably productive, just not on the one project that, for one reason or another, I regard as too daunting to begin.

Aside from procrastinatory writing, I have plenty of ways to avoid undesirable projects. First, I live in on an old farmstead with buildings in need of constant repair. Then there is the landscaping work: lawnmowing, tree pruning, and rototilling.

If the weather is bad, I can always organize my desk or rearrange my books. Or maybe I can just see what’s in the fridge, or make a list of what should be in the fridge and go grocery shopping. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, one of my three little daughters will be lurking on the other side of my office door, and will say, “Play with me, Daddy!” Then I can come out, as if I am making a sacrifice, and play with the girls on the living room floor until they are tired and it is too late for me to resume writing.

If none of those options presents itself, I can always log on to the Internet, read some newspaper columns, see if L.L. Bean or Land’s End has anything on sale, visit a number of online booksellers, and then search for some of my favorite collectibles on eBay.

If that doesn’t satisfy, I’ll probably make the rounds of about 30 academic blogs. If I am avoiding something particularly frightening, I might leave an extended comment somewhere and spend the next couple days dealing with the consequences. Sometimes I’ll Google my name just to see if anyone is writing about me -- and then I’ll appear like a demon whose name it is dangerous to mention.

When I am teaching, I can always spend more time preparing my classes. Sometimes I’ll even find ways to schedule more meetings with my students, just to see how they are doing and to talk with them about the course material. Sometimes I’ll troll the corridors, looking for colleagues to chat with. If I have exhausted all of those options, I can always make a list of all the things I am going to do tomorrow, this week, and possibly next summer.

For all the useful anxiety that procrastination inevitably provokes, I have never been happy after completing a long-postponed obligation. Relieved, yes. Or, perhaps, empty, deflated, and devoid of purpose. One should never complete a difficult project without having another one available to replace it. Without something onerous to avoid, I become unable to complete the minor obligations that once seemed like an escape from anxiety.

Fortunately, I’m procrastinating right now. It’s much easier to write a column than a long-promised scholarly book chapter. I suspect you, dear reader, are procrastinating too.

But, fret not. The best advice I ever heard is that life is what we do when we are avoiding something else. There are already too many books chasing too few readers, and, perhaps, the best thing for most us to do is take some time to play with our kids, talk to our students and colleagues, cultivate our gardens, and live well.

Inevitably, our best books will be the ones we never finish.