What Is Procrastination, & How Can We Beat It?

There’s a Word file—somewhere—on one of the many flash drives jumbled in a drawer in my home office. That file is named something like “Overcoming_Procrastination_Column.docx” and was last accessed in the year 2018. I know I wrote about 500 words, and then, one day, I said I would finish it later. But I never did. Over the years, I’ve tried searching in vain for this file, knowing it was a good, heartfelt piece, but now I am resigned to the reality that it’s lost to time. That’s why I’m writing this column—and if you are seeing it in print, it means I have finally learned my lesson and actually overcome procrastination. How did I do that, exactly? Let’s rheuminate!

A Brief History of Procrastination

Before talking about procrastination, let’s not delay in at least first defining what procrastination is. Not surprisingly, the word comes from Latin, with the roots pro (i.e., forward) and crastinus (i.e., until the next day).¹ Procrastination seems like a really appropriate term because mostly it isn’t necessarily to indefinitely postpone but rather to move it to a definite tomorrow, which may never really arrive. It also shows how ancient this concept is. If even the Romans had a word for procrastination, you can imagine how ingrained procrastination must be.

In fact, the earliest advice for not engaging in procrastination comes from the Greek poet Hesiod in around 800 BCE, who talked about not “putting work off until tomorrow or the day after.”² From that time to now, procrastination seems to have become deeply ingrained and highly prevalent.

In a 2004 study of university students, over 70% self-identified as procrastinators.³ And those are only the ones who self-identified. I am sure many others are secret procrastinators and even more who decided to do the survey later—until the survey closed.

In the field of rheumatology, no studies appear to have been conducted on our procrastination habits, but I bet you the practice is just as widespread.

The Roots

If it looks like procrastination is so hurtful, why in the world is it that we engage in such a terrible habit? At least for me, a large part of what drives my procrastination is perfectionism. It really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that an editor is a perfectionist. Editors and writers are tasked with looking at each detail and scrutinizing whether a word, or even a letter or space, is appropriate or not. Perfectionist tendencies can come in handy in situations like that, but in the real world—when there is no such thing as perfection yet we seek it constantly—you can understand where that primal dread of getting things done imperfectly can come from.