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Pleasure, Pride, and Procrastination
An essay on the motivational forces that pull us from and push us toward doing our best work, and how I deal with them
I have struggled with procrastination for as long as I can remember. As a kid, being asked to clean my minimally messy room turned into a day long project. I would go through many iterations and variations of avoiding the simple task that I was given. At 9 AM, my mother would ask me to pick things up. When she returned at noon, almost 0 progress would have been made. It was agonizing to both of us.
Fast forward to my time in college, and the situation was much the same. I was aware of deadlines for papers, but paid them no mind until the night before — when the panic would strike. The result was a whole lot of stress and self-flagellation as I forced myself to sit down and do the work. And yet somehow, I would even find ways to procrastinate then, up until the very final minutes.
Once I settled into a career, I was frustrated to find that this still did not change all that much. I would continue to feel a sense of being behind, and letting deadlines pass, or barely meeting them by the skin of my teeth, and with thrown-together work. For the life of me, I just couldn’t overcome this tendency to put off the hard stuff, or even the…
