Have you known someone at the LSE who wakes up at the same time every day, sets off to the library at the same time, allows themselves a short break at lunchtime almost like clockwork and is to be found leaving campus, bleary eyed at the exact hour that you saw them leave only the other day? If you haven’t met this species of LSE student, then you must belong to it.
Those disciplined to this timetabled life try not to feel bad about their relatively lackluster efforts at studying, but it is difficult to maintain any optimism when they encounter people with minutely formulated plans for the ten years ahead – a feat even beyond Joseph Stalin and the might of the USSR. These driven individuals know exactly what their next five steps will be. Although I am inclined to believe that I am better off being open to whatever life brings me, most people I know who my conception of the ‘homo structuralis’ seem rather happy with the way they are. They still manage to have fun, but it is organized fun. Even when they procrastinate, they do so in a productive way.
Professor John Perry of Stanford University has written an essay about Structural Procrastination and he believes that he suffers from this ‘problem’. In fact he credits his essay to this syndrome (if I can even call it that). If only we could all come up with an innovative theory every time we were in need of some distraction from the mundane! Although he believes that we are all procrastinators, he posits that structural procrastinators differ from us mere mortals because they divert their attentions away from the important, but towards other missions.
We seldom do nothing at all when we are procrastinating, but do fall into the trap of doing things that are of no use whatsoever, such as logging onto Facebook or watching old box sets. However structural procrastinators need to deceive themselves into believing that they are only putting off completing the most important tasks on their lists to take care of other duties. In doing so, they are still productive. Professor Perry gives the example of how he ignored a stack of essays that needed to be marked in order to go and play ping pong with some undergraduate students on the campus. At first glance, this may not seem very structured at all. He continued to go and play with these students and he gained a reputation for being a ‘Mr Chips’ like figure, and became well liked in comparison to other professors who were regarded as not having much time for undergraduates.
A friend of mine once attended a ten week -series of workshops on how to overcome the problem of procrastination and she said that it became evident that there were two reasons why people procrastinated. The first of these was the fear of failure, and the second was, strangely, the fear of success. We can all figure out why a fear of failure may lock us into a chronic avoidance of important deadlines, but it seems counter intuitive to procrastinate in order to shun success.
However, Dr Joseph Ferrari actually thinks that whether we are afraid of failure or success, both of these issues are based upon what others think of us. And yet, the homo structuralis who can be found in the library’s fish tank fears procrastination. Who can blame them when it seems apparent that procrastination is a state of mind which we have to constantly justify with the excuses of ‘this needed to be done anyway’ or ‘I’ll do that as soon as I am done with this’. Some will argue that this is a symptom of modern society or capitalism, because we carry the burden of the idea that we must constantly be useful, or adding bullet points to our CVs.
The real problem is that it makes us ill. Back to Dr Ferrari, who tells us that over just one academic term, procrastinating students compromise their immune systems and become more susceptible to common colds. He also found that people can suffer from insomnia, despite the fact that the guilt over the low productivity has probably drained them of energy. The cure for this, according to the Doctor, is highly structured cognitive behavioural theory. Is that really what we need; more structure?
Well, maybe it is. Routines are not unhealthy unless they are too rigid to allow any space in the day to relax. It is very possible that we do need to be re-programmed to believe that it is acceptable to not be useful or industrious for a short while, and then we would maybe also feel less inclined to procrastinate as often as we take a breath. Often the most resilient structures are those which we construct in our minds and can become almost pathological. So whether you are fortunate enough to be a structural procrastinator, capable of turning avoidance into an art or whether you are reading this article to distract yourself from a pile of books, you deserve a break I think.
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