a useful self-deception?

By PJK

Sloth: one of the seven deadly sins. Also a large tree-dwelling mammal (see above). We may not be living in trees just yet, but perhaps it's possible that through the former we might in fact be evolving (or is it devolving?) into the latter...

Who knows, maybe it's the absurd over-abundance of modern conveniences in our consumer-driven lifestyles, or maybe it's the legacy of 20th Century counter-culture movements. Or something. In any case, in this day and age laziness is not uncommon and is certainly no longer something to be frowned upon. I would go as far as to say that laziness is now almost seen as a virtue. Thanks to the Simpsons, lazy people are chic; the energetic are to be pitied. Calling someone a 'try-hard' is a term of derision amongst the youth of today; if something takes effort it is not considered cool, no matter how cool it might be.

I for one have adopted laziness as a way of life, taking the great hedonists of Ancient Greece as my mentors. I won't even look at an assignment until at least a week before the due date, and many of my peers are even more adept at putting things off than I am. This should hardly come as a surprise; students are born procrastinators. In fact, we go to such great lengths to avoid studying that paradoxically, we end up performing a lot more activity on impulse than we would ever manage otherwise. It's why this blog exists, it's why all these posts were written, it's probably the very reason you're reading this right now.

This is precisely the phenomenon that Marc Abraham discusses in this week's Guardian:

Critics say modern philosophy is a useless waste of time. They are wrong. At its best, modern philosophy tells us how to waste time usefully. Philosophy's great recent achievement, in this respect and perhaps overall, is the theory of structured procrastination.

In a 1995 paper, Structured Procrastination, John Perry, a professor of philosophy at Stanford University, explains: "I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, a National Science Foundation proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish, and the good use they make of time."

Perry's notion is to channel an ostensibly bad habit ... "Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list."

...

Perry points out that "structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is, in effect, constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself ... This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills . And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?"

I couldn't agree more. Perhaps there is a better means of coping with the rigorous, boredom-inducing workload of academic life, rather than resorting to the masochism of procrastination. But if there is, I'll look into it some other time. Right now I'm going to go sort my entire wardrobe by colour. Maybe when I'm done I'll arrange my DVD collection alphabetically...