Behind the Ironic Column

If there were medals for the art of procrastination, I’d be right up there at the top.  That is if I could persuade myself that it was worth entering the contest before the medals were actually awarded.  I’ve been telling myself I was going to write this essay for several weeks now…and sometimes even thinking about it but no words were ever actually typed. 

In one of my former lives I had a consultant who worked with me on designing systems.  We would have these long detailed meetings where we talked about scope and features and all of those pieces you need to talk about before jumping into a project design.   Then the next day he would look at me and say “ But we already talked about all that…” We had indeed talked about it but talk was the operative word in that sentence.  No actual design documents or computer code had been written.  Talking about it or, even worse, thinking about talking about it, just isn’t the same thing as making it happen in real life.

So why am I congratulating myself on getting a medal that I haven’t actually summoned up the energy to apply for?  That’s exactly the reason.  Who deserves an award for procrastination more than someone who endlessley procrastinates entering the contest that would give the award.  It’s very much like those meetings of the procrastinators club we used to have when I lived in D.C.  I don’t recall actually going to a single meeting – but there were always notices and counternotices and such – so you felt as if the meeting had occurred whether it did in real life or not.  So much of D.C. was eerily unrelated to real life anyway that those sessions fit right in.

I don’t really procrastinate everything – for instance I’ve just been shopping for my niece’s birthday which is a whole 5 days away.  I don’t believe children should have to suffer for the inconsistencies of adults.  She’ll be surprised to find out that the rule doesn’t apply once she’s no longer a child and present-giving drops off dramatically, but she has several more years to go before that happens. 

Now I’m casting around in my mental closets for other things I wouldn’t delay – but the list is pretty short.  Curiously enough. one of them is what we loosely refer to as “customer service.”  I’ve worked in a variety of jobs that included responding either to the general public (in a government position that dealt with citizens concerned about how we were handling their money) or a specific set of clients (when working for law firms and trade associations).  Getting an answer back to the taxpayer or the client was always on the top of my work list – much higher than going to another meeting, writing a ‘position paper’ or doing personnel reviews.  This tended to cause me grief because my bosses’ priorities didn’t always mesh with my priority list – particularly if the customer was a member of the general public and not someone with a more immediate hand on the purse strings.  Not that they didn’t want to give good service to the public – what they apparently really wanted was for me to do both.  But I quickly found out that doing both only led to more and more requests to do more – and that some of the allegedly “urgent” tasks vanished if no one acknowledged their existence.  That’s the way to take a person already inclined toward delayed gratification (the good spin we put on procrastination) and convince them that delay is a good thing.  The perfect blend of nature and nurture. 

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