Ireland could be the world centre of procrastination but are we willing to put in the work?
PROCRASTINATION SEEMS to be having a bit of a moment, or it will be next week, when The Art of Procrastination finally gets published. For those of us who live amidst crumbling deadlines and piles of extremely important books and articles which we simply must read some day – and, contrary to popular myths promulgated by management gurus, that’s just about all of us – The Art of Procrastination is perhaps the one manual we do not need.
But I wonder if John Perry, who wrote The Art of Procrastination, has considered procrastination as a problem which can occur on a national scale?
I don’t want to start a stampede or anything, but it could be that Ireland is the world capital of procrastination. We could certainly host the global conference on procrastination if we’re prepared to work the last-minute bookings thing.
Any fool can write about their personal experiences of postponing everything – and believe me I intend to write about just that right here, in a moment.
But what about a country where Christmas decorations are left up 52 weeks of the year, pale ghosts against the concrete, just so no one has the trouble of erecting them for a fortnight each December?
What about a country where the clocks on public buildings aren’t put forward when official summer time begins for the very simple reason that the same clocks will only have to be put back in the winter, and that’s a whole lot of trouble.
What about a national broadcaster that can’t be bothered to change the title or the email address of its flagship radio programmes, again in the summer time, even though the presenters have gone on several months holidays?
But forget all that, forget all that. If you really want to know about the Irish psyche – and I realise that some people have tired of hearing about the Irish psyche, but they are all foreigners – you need look no further than our treatment of pot plants.
Outside the chicest offices and businesses posh plants die screaming, crumple and go brown. It is frightening to think that members of the Troika have been wandering our streets looking at the incontrovertible evidence that they are being asked to prop up and bankroll a country that has never conquered regular watering. We should have hidden all those pots before they arrived.
Surely all these rather minor annoyances are the result of procrastination, which has this country by the throat.
Because procrastination is not simply putting off until tomorrow what can be done today – ha! that is the low babies of procrastination, not even entry level.
Procrastination is also not performing tasks for the very good reason that time will, ultimately, prove those tasks unnecessary if not downright futile.
It is quite a sophisticated philosophical position, when you think about it. (John Perry, who has written The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Dallying, Lollygagging and Postponing, or, Getting Things Done by Putting Them Off – I postponed giving the full title – is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford university. Haven’t a clue what lollygagging is.) Cleaning is the perfect field for procrastination, and, you know, as a nation we’re not great at cleaning.
The feng shui people have made a fortune out of using the term de-cluttering instead of old fashioned names such as cleaning and tidying, but feng shui, like the Tidy Towns movement, is an industry firmly aimed at the procrastinators.
Procrastinators don’t clean unless we’re supposed to be doing something else. Or, and I hope I have Prof Perry’s theory correct, unless you can delude yourself into doing things by renaming the tasks to yourself. He maintains that procrastinators cannot really change, we can only restructure our problem.
Thus feng shui and the Tidy Towns movement, jollying us all along to do what sensible people do as a matter of course. And it is a lovely surprise to see your mantelpiece emerging from the debris of dead candles and old postcards, just as it is amazing to see what a few tubs of hotly debated begonias can do to a couple of the town’s traffic islands.
Meanwhile, back on the domestic front, all that smart stainless steel in the kitchen has become very dull, and the window sills and the stairwells of our office buildings – even the few office buildings which are still occupied – are furring with dust. The procrastinator’s reaction to both of these situations is simple enough – let’s move. We want to walk away from disaster and start again. To really understand procrastination you have to feel the pretty mad logic of this reaction in your bones.
We like the new, where nothing has been postponed yet.
As a nation we’d prefer to get into debt than dust anything regularly. As managers – ha! – we’d prefer to see a whole health service implode than risk making a decision.
Perhaps it is time that we wrote off for a job lot of The Art of Procrastination. There is a chance that we could learn a lot from it, if we ever got round to reading it.