How the problem I thought I had wasn’t what I’d been calling it—and why that matters.
It’s the middle of the night and I’m returning from a dance event that is 170 miles away. I’ve been driving for hours. I’m desperate to get home, get into bed, and get some much needed sleep. Or I’ve popped to the supermarket to buy food for dinner. I’ve got hardly any time because I need to prep, cook, eat and be out of the house in less time than I actually have available to complete all those tasks. Or it’s just a regular trip in the car and returning home is the culmination of the journey because home is where both myself and my car live.
For some reason, regardless of the circumstance, the length of the drive, the time of day, what preceded the drive, what needs to come afterwards, any urgency (or not), when I pull up at home I know I should go inside the house but something happens in my brain that stops me from turning off the car, taking the keys out of the ignition, and then leaving the car. Step one and step two are relatively straightforward — I’m pretty good at turning off the car and preparing to leave it. Because the delay in getting out is not because I want to keep driving. It’s not even that I don’t want to go in the house. It’s more that I know what I need to do but my brain and body are resisting doing it. Writing this article has been the same.
I set up my Substack account months ago, updated my profile weeks ago, and then set up a publication days ago... flurries of activity followed by an absence of the one thing that all those tasks were actually in service of: writing. I feel like I’ve been doing the Substack equivalent of sitting in the car outside my house when I know the purpose of the drive was to get home.
I actually enjoy writing once I do it, so there’s an element of this situation that’s puzzled me. But then again, I have form for delaying tasks, or deferring getting started. Because it’s not just getting out of the car or writing where this pattern shows up. I find it hard to get out of bed even when I know I need to be up and getting ready; I can talk myself out of having a shower and then enjoy it so much once I’m in there that I don’t want to get out; I get my suitcase out well ahead of time, write an extremely detailed packing list but pack at the very last minute; I do immense amounts of research before buying an item I’m really excited to purchase, but it will often sit in my basket — sometimes indefinitely — before I actually checkout.
This isn’t a new thing for me either... I can’t blame being busy with work, or having three children, or engaging in really involved hobbies, even though all of those things are true. Since I was a child I’ve struggled with getting things done. I was often told to go and tidy my room but hours later it looked worse than before I started. My mum would find me on the floor counting badges I’d collected, or folding shiny purple tin foil I’d saved from Cadbury chocolate bar wrappers, or reading one of the many books I seemed to favour instead of doing whatever it was I was meant to be doing. At school I would often complete homework in the corridor before the class started, or surreptitiously try to finish it in the lesson. I have spent a lifetime being ‘just about on time’ because I’ve been convinced that I can absolutely get that task finished before setting off.
During the last year of high school, my form tutor told me I was a procrastinator. It seemed to explain my habits of behaviour well and there were too many instances of me delaying tasks and putting off getting started for me to reject the label. So, over the years I’ve tried to follow the advice for procrastinators... ‘just get started’, ‘break down tasks and start small’, ‘write things down and commit to them’, ‘reward yourself for completing activities’. And I can absolutely see how these advice snippets are useful... unfortunately, they’ve never quite worked for me. Nevertheless, I’ve often thought I am just a particularly stubborn procrastinator and the solution is to work harder on tactics and overcome the desire to delay. Sometimes that works — for all of a couple of weeks. I’ve also done a lot of work on the emotional and psychological aspects associated with procrastination. Despite the fact that the reasons provided haven’t always felt like they fit how I actually feel, I assumed that there was a deeper anxiety that my conscious mind didn’t necessarily have access to.
So when I started putting off writing my first Substack article, I thought it was just another expression of my tendency to procrastinate. And, for sure, I think there’s probably an element of anxiety that has contributed to the delay... but it hasn’t felt like the whole story. And then the other day I pulled up outside my house and had the familiar feeling of wanting to be inside my home and not wanting to get out of the car all at the same time, and I realised that that feeling —of wanting the next thing but not feeling finished with the current thing— was much closer to how I’d been feeling when I’d been considering starting to write; much more so than an anxiety to get started. Because starting to write this article means stopping writing my website copy; it means putting down the business development for a bit and switching to a different way of thinking and writing. This insight got me thinking: maybe the reason being a ‘procrastinator’ has felt accurate, but only partially so, is because it’s not the whole story in those other situations either.
During the last year of high school, my form tutor told me I was a procrastinator. It seemed to explain my habits of behaviour well and there were too many instances of me delaying tasks and putting off getting started for me to reject the label. So, over the years I’ve tried to follow the advice for procrastinators... ‘just get started’, ‘break down tasks and start small’, ‘write things down and commit to them’, ‘reward yourself for completing activities’. And I can absolutely see how these advice snippets are useful... unfortunately, they’ve never quite worked for me. Nevertheless, I’ve often thought I am just a particularly stubborn procrastinator and the solution is to work harder on tactics and overcome the desire to delay. Sometimes that works — for all of a couple of weeks. I’ve also done a lot of work on the emotional and psychological aspects associated with procrastination. Despite the fact that the reasons provided haven’t always felt like they fit how I actually feel, I assumed that there was a deeper anxiety that my conscious mind didn’t necessarily have access to.
So when I started putting off writing my first Substack article, I thought it was just another expression of my tendency to procrastinate. And, for sure, I think there’s probably an element of anxiety that has contributed to the delay... but it hasn’t felt like the whole story. And then the other day I pulled up outside my house and had the familiar feeling of wanting to be inside my home and not wanting to get out of the car all at the same time, and I realised that that feeling —of wanting the next thing but not feeling finished with the current thing— was much closer to how I’d been feeling when I’d been considering starting to write; much more so than an anxiety to get started. Because starting to write this article means stopping writing my website copy; it means putting down the business development for a bit and switching to a different way of thinking and writing. This insight got me thinking: maybe the reason being a ‘procrastinator’ has felt accurate, but only partially so, is because it’s not the whole story in those other situations either.
Getting out of bed is hard because I want to stay cosy and spend time scrolling on Instagram, at the same time as getting up and getting on with my day. Just like staying in the car feels like a moment of rest before getting on with whatever is afterwards, even when ‘afterwards’ contains something I want to do. It’s not necessarily that I’m resisting the next thing, it’s that there’s something about the existing activity still feeling like it’s in process and not quite ‘completed’ enough to transition to the next one. So, I’ve realised that what seems like procrastination is less of a deferral of a future practice or state, and more of a lingering of the current one.
Sometimes this lingering feels so diffuse it’s almost unexplainable - my teenage kids don’t really ‘get it’ when I hand them the house keys to let themselves in the house so I can sit in the car for a bit; to be honest, I don’t really get it either. I just know I feel like I need to let the energy of the drive dissipate before I can leave the car. Yet, at other times it’s less like there’s a ‘residue’ of the previous activity and more that the current activity feels so persistent that it’s hard to overcome it in order to do the next thing.
When I’m preparing to go away, for example, I don’t leave packing until the last minute because I need the time pressure to get it completed; I’m not choosing to relax instead of pack because I’m prioritising present-Natasha’s comfort over future-Natasha’s comfort; and it’s not even particularly pragmatic and wanting to keep access to things I need until the last minute. It’s that packing for my holiday feels like part of my holiday —like getting ready feels like part of a night out, or wrapping presents feels like part of Christmas (it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I wrap on Christmas Eve!)— and until I feel like I’ve done enough management of my everyday life to temporarily suspend it whilst I’m not here, I don’t feel like I can transition into holiday mode. And whilst at some point there is a time pressure that forces me to pack regardless of how ready I feel to do so, what might look like classic procrastination doesn’t really feel like it to me. But why does it matter what I call it? If the situation is the situation, does it matter if I call it procrastination even if that doesn’t feel like it completely ‘fits’ what’s going on for me?
Personally, I have a natural orientation towards accuracy and precision in language what I know many others don’t have. For other people, it can seem unimportant that something that looks like procrastination and sounds like procrastination and acts like procrastination, is not called procrastination when the internal feeling is experienced differently. However, in ‘Atlas of the Heart’, Professor Brené Brown highlights how important it is to be able to “have access to the right words” when it comes to our emotions and experiences. She says,
“Without accurate language, we struggle to get the help we need, we don’t always regulate or manage our emotions and experiences in a way that allows us to move through them productively, and our self-awareness is diminished”.
I was an impressionable teenager when I was told I was a procrastinator and I had no reason to believe that that person hadn’t seen something about me that I hadn’t seen about myself. But even then, I knew there was something about the description of procrastination that didn’t quite fit all the times I’d put off or delay doing something. Unfortunately, the procrastinator identity felt true enough to be believable but not quite true enough to be as useful as I wanted it to be.
Because the advice for procrastinators never quite worked, or when it did, it never quite held. Without the accurate language, I struggled to move through my experiences as productively as I would have liked. But once I start seeing that my pattern isn’t about avoiding the next thing, and instead is about needing to be ready for it by resolving my current engagement first, I am able to practice navigating with more insight, clarity and acceptance.
We went on holiday a few weeks ago and I still packed at the last minute, but I didn’t feel as stressed about it as I usually do. I also tried to start my transition to holiday-mode sooner than I normally do, which gave me a bit more time to get everything done — I realised that even ‘last minute’ doesn’t always have to mean ‘last possible minute’! And when I realised that my delay in getting started writing this article was probably about not feeling ready to put the other work down, I was able to compartmentalise and allow myself to take a temporary step back from writing my website copy so I could write this (also helped by a seven day free trial of a writing app that gave me a deadline — the procrastinator label definitely fits a bit!).
Now my next task is to feel like the writing process is finished enough to actually post it! And that means I’m not going to agonise about whether it’s perfectly polished but I’m also not going to post it immediately; instead I’m going to linger. I’m going to ‘sit in the car’ and take a breath. Then I’m going to upload it and gather my things and go in the house; it’s nice to be home.
I’d love to hear where this might connect with something in your own life — a pattern you’ve noticed, a label that hasn’t quite fit, or a situation that has made more sense once you found a different way of describing it.
Notes for Reflection…
1. Is there something you think of as procrastination that might look different if you asked what you’re finding it difficult to leave, rather than what you’re avoiding starting?
2. Where in your life might a description of your behaviour be accurate enough to feel true, but not accurate enough to feel as useful as you’d like?
3. What might you think, feel, or do differently if you had a more accurate way of describing what’s going on for you — and where and how could you test that difference in practice?