I am a selective procrastinator and it drives me nuts.  “How,” I ask myself, “can you be such an organized, list-making, spreadsheet-loving, OCD-like person and yet put off seemingly random, often straightforward things for an eternity?!”  Here’s an example:  I’ve wanted to write about procrastination for a long time, but haven’t done it until now.  Seriously.  I kept putting off writing about procrastination.  Why?  Well, here’s the story.

I wanted to include a favorite cartoon that I cut out of the paper when I was in grad school.  The first five panels of this Sunday cartoon showed a woman going through a series of cleaning and other chores.  In the last panel, which is the one I saved, she lay exhausted in a chair with the caption:  “Beneath this workaholic exterior beats the heart of a lazy person.”  I loved that cartoon!  I was convinced that underneath it all I was really lazy.  I was never sure exactly how I got done whatever I did get done!  So, before writing this essay, I wanted to find that cartoon.

I could have sworn I kept that last panel on the door to my lab in grad school.  And I’m sure I kept taking it with me, office to office in Air Products.  So, it would have made it into the box of office stuff I took home after leaving Intertek, right?  Now, where was that box?  I searched through the basement.  I came back up to my home office and looked in various hiding places.  I saw most of the Office Items that would have been in that box scattered about so I must have unpacked it.  After digging around the office for hours, I think, “Let’s try on line.”  I searched first the website of the cartoon that I swore was the source.  Then searched more broadly with the text of the punchline.  All of this activity happened piecemeal over many, many days and weeks.  Meanwhile, no essay had been written.  I felt I couldn’t start writing until I found that cartoon.  See where I’m going with this?

There are lots of reasons people procrastinate.  There are lots of reasons why I, myself, procrastinate.  Sometimes it’s fear, like why it took me so long to try a spin class at the Y.  Sometimes it really is just laziness, like trying on the bathing suit I bought months ago.  But a good percentage of the time, I realize, I procrastinate because I’m a perfectionist.  I think about how I’ve coached many people over the years to get over their procrastination tendencies.  “Just start,” I say.  “Just create the blank file or a spreadsheet.  Start by making a list of the tasks that need to be done and then tackle just the first one.”  And then the clincher: “It doesn’t have to be perfect.  It just needs to get done.”   

But I want it to be perfect!  Not surprisingly, I’ve done some research on “perfectionism”.  There are two types of perfectionists:  Externally Motivated and Internally Motivated.  I am an Internally Motivated Perfectionist.  I couldn’t care less about YOUR judgement on my degree of perfection.  It is ME who wants everything I do to be perfect.  I like the neatness of it; the elegance of a perfect solution; the satisfaction of doing something as well as I can do it.  But being perfect at a task seems like such a herculean effort that it paralyzes me!  And so I keep on looking for the cartoon because the cartoon would make the essay perfect and I want it to be perfect.  And I delay writing the essay.  Or the business proposal. Or the performance review. If I can’t be perfect, I don’t want to do it at all.  Then I get mad and frustrated with myself.  And then I usually have a snack.  That leads to other issues that will be discussed another time.

While I share this trait with many, I don’t share it with my wife.  Trish is also an Internally Motivated Perfectionist, but instead of paralyzing her and leading to procrastination, her perfectionism drives her to complete any task on her to-do list as soon as humanly possible: to the extent that she drives herself nuts, runs around frantically, and usually ends up hurting her foot. 

Trish keeps a short list of must-do items and her drive is to get them DONE.  Me?  I have an endless number of potential tasks on my to-do list.  I don’t just care about getting them done, I care about getting them done PERFECTLY.  We balance each other well.  She can motivate me to get moving with a heavy sigh, an eye roll and a gentle “You haven’t done that yet?”  I can calm her down a bit and convince her that she doesn’t need to go outside in the dark in the rain to find out why a landscaping light isn’t working.  It can actually wait until morning.

The next step in this essay should be some magic words of wisdom about how to overcome this problem.  Sure wish I had them.  All I can say is that sometimes I can get myself going and sometimes I can’t.  What helps is that I’ve learned to give myself a bit of grace because I am old enough now to know that things that really need to get done somehow always get done.  True enough, I would sigh in frustration when tackling a business proposal that I just couldn’t get myself to start.  I’d read emails.  Or walk the halls.  Or even, lord help me, make a phone call I’d been putting off.  But, eventually, things would get done.  I wrote the performance reviews and business proposals.  I’ve written this essay.  No, they don’t necessarily reach the degree of perfection that I would want, but they are good enough.

So, give yourself a little grace, too.  We all procrastinate.  Most of us are perfectionists to some degree.  We all get paralyzed by a task every now and then.  Or sometimes we continue to plow forward to just get something done instead of taking a step back and assessing a better path.  Think about what is causing you to hesitate and who is relying on your output.  Sometimes just putting the reasons in context helps you get going.  Don’t beat yourself up.  You know that just makes it worse! 

Remember to give others some grace, too.  Yes, you are depending on that person to get something done.  You can’t do what YOU need to do until they do their part!  Help them get started, or at least offer.  And if someone else offers you help, take it.  

So how long did it take me to get this essay done?  Well, the bigger challenge was starting the blog.  Those who have known me know that I’ve been saying I’ve wanted to write for years and years.  I needed to figure out the “what” and the “how”, but more than anything I had to get over my need for everything I put out there to be perfect.  That activation barrier was huge!  Now if only I could get myself to organize this office space, but I think I’ll get Trish off that ladder in the rain before she falls.