Would anything happen without deadlines? This must be another one of those two kinds of people things: those that self-motivate and those that need a deadline in order to accomplish anything. I will self-impose a deadline if someone else doesn’t. That’s why this whole blog challenge has been successful: I have to get something written by midnight.
Pressure does help me; I am one of those “good in a pinch” people. I am also good at determining something is not urgent and pushing it aside, even if it is important. The biggest thing that falls into that category for me personally is exercise. I have benefited in the past from taking organized classes because I have to stick to a schedule that way.
I don’t know where my ability to procrastinate comes from. Is it one of those “I still have my whole life ahead of me” sorts of things? Is it a visceral, hedonistic desire: why should I do something productive that will pay off eventually when I could do something that’s instantly gratifying like look at random crap on the web? I heard a radio program on procrastination one day, but I knew I could always get the podcast of it later, so I didn’t pay much attention to it.
That’s one of the dirty secrets of the future: time shifting creates a sort of debt. People have backlogs of email, unread RSS feeds, TiVo’d shows, and unheeded podcasts waiting for time that will never make itself available. Now we have email bankruptcy and the like. Since I’m always looking for short-term distractions, I’ve never had to just purge my inbox and start over, and I don’t really use feed readers because I’ll just feel dirty and shameful for never reading all the stuff that I feel I should read but manage to get along without.
Is procrastination getting worse? I’m not sure. Let me check with a few experts and get back to you on that.