The Opposite of Progress

‘Is procrastination the single most destructive force in the universe?’

This was a question that one of the Sun Spiral team pondered during a long meeting last week. It’s a bold notion and got us thinking deeply about what procrastination actually is.

Procrastination is often seen as a delaying tactic, so our team member’s thinking might seem odd or even a touch dramatic. Surely the inaction associated with procrastination is more of an absence of action rather than action itself. How can this be synonymous with a destructive force?

We decided that this absence of action is an invisible force of its own, in the same way as a black hole isn’t visible itself but its presence is known by the pull exerted on objects around it.

I like the analogy of a black hole. According to Britannica, a black hole is a ‘cosmic body of extremely intense gravity from which nothing, not even light, can escape’. For me, procrastination is an intense force that holds us back and stops us making progress. It’s not merely acting out a ‘lazy’ option, like choosing Netflix over hoovering, but rather the overwhelming urge to do something that doesn’t have value in itself.

When we talk about procrastination, we are thinking more in terms of busywork – activities that occupy time but don’t have a useful purpose. Busywork can be prevalent at an individual or organisational level and is often difficult to spot – when, for example, does improving the data become tinkering, or setting up yet another meeting become more about the activity of the meeting itself, rather than the desired outcome?

Being assigned busywork by someone else causes demotivation and resentment because it makes people ‘act out’ an inauthentic image of productivity. But it’s not just a top-down management problem and those of us who have autonomy in how we carry out our work can fool ourselves into assigning importance to things that don’t really matter at the expense of our goals, thinking that if we get the small stuff out the way then the big stuff will somehow sort itself out. It’s a false economy and, given the stress and unhappiness that this will ultimately cause, perhaps the ‘destructive force’ label isn’t so dramatic after all.

So how do we stop ourselves getting sucked into that black hole? The way to truly differentiate between useful work and busywork is to be able to appreciate whether an activity genuinely contributes to a desired outcome or goal. If there is no clear objective to form the basis of what you are doing, it just keeps you busy without being constructive or productive, then it’s probably busywork. Having a set of clear goals will always help you to make good use of your working time, which in turn means that you will feel less guilty about enjoying your leisure time because you no longer confuse it with procrastination.

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