Procrastination: 'If I stay at my desk and play Candy Crush for hours, I can say I was working'

The best place to procrastinate is in close proximity to the work you’re supposed to be doing. I should note that after writing that first line, I went to make a cup of tea and then put a load of laundry into the machine, all the while convincing myself that “Sure I started, so I’m not procrastinating”.

If you stay near where you’re supposed to be working, then you can pretend you are in fact almost working in some sort of osmotic fashion.

If you go out to avoid your work, the guilt will begin to gnaw at your gut like the burbling threat of diarrhoea the morning after a dodgy Indian takeaway, and you might have to admit there’s a problem.

You’ll think: “If I leave my desk and spend 40 minutes in a cafe eating a muffin (even though I’m not hungry), it might signify some sort of breakdown. But if I stay at my desk and play Candy Crush for three hours, I can say I was working if anyone asks.”

There is a corner of my mind devoted entirely to haughtily disdaining people who put off what they are supposed to be doing, which is of course a sure sign I’m a person who puts off what they’re supposed to be doing.

We tend to react most strongly to the traits in others we are trying to deny about ourselves. I am thoroughly ashamed to admit to being a serial procrastinator, or at least to having become one. Perhaps if we were all more honest about it, we’d hurry up and get down to work.

We don’t pay sufficiently serious attention to procrastination as a poor behaviour and as a symptom of a bigger problem. We associate it with distracted, hormonally overwhelmed teenagers who just can’t seem to “knuckle down” in the weeks before the Leaving Cert, as spring starts to bloom sluttily into summer, flashing its heady perfume and garish colours in their easily distracted direction.

Of course, a touch of procrastination here and there is perfectly standard. You might decide, for example, to schedule an invasive medical check-up on the day you swore finally to sit down with your tax return, because a vigorous prostate exam actually seems preferable, now you think of it.

But, of course, a tax evader can be someone who simply kept putting off a scary task for years. With enough procrastination, we can indeed allow something important and respectable in ourselves to be degraded.

Fear of failure

We often put serial procrastination down to being easily distracted or flighty, but it’s far more sinister than that. It is in reality an incapacitating fear of failure that leads us to put off doing something we fear, or perhaps even know, we can’t do to as high a standard as we’d like.

We sacrifice larger, far-off gains for smaller and much less fulfilling immediate gratification. As creatures, we crave progress, and the sense that those around us are getting on with things and succeeding while we pathologically put things off simply makes us feel bad.

Specifically, it makes us feel guilty, ashamed, and results in us disliking ourselves.

It’s a pity then that negative emotions tend not to spur us on, but rather to keep us trapped in the pattern we’ve fallen into. To escape it, we will usually take the good old Irish Catholic route of dressing ourselves down and trying to force ourselves out of the rut.

Like a car stuck in wet mud, the screeching whirr of the wheels’ effort simply sinks us further in. We need to recognise procrastination for what it is – the jutted lower lip of our pouty inner child.

I hope that by understanding her fear and reluctance is couched in insecurity, I can quiet her nerves and put her to bed. Alain deBotton once tweeted that “Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.” He wasn’t wrong.

Procrastination unnecessarily increases the difficulty of difficult tasks, but you will get there in the end. So try not to delay beginning for fear you can’t reach the end. And yes, I turned this column in slightly late.