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I have had a love/hate relationship with procrastination for most of my life. Convinced it was a detriment and something to put into my weakness column of personality traits, I would attempt to head it off only to continually procrastinate that initiative too. I am glad I struggled and put that off for a “rainy day” though, because over the years it has served me well. So well, that I dare say I would include it as one of my strengths now!
I can understand your hesitancy to consider this perceived flaw to be a good quality to have, but I am making the case for it actually having saved the day many times. Now I am not advocating for complete avoidance, just putting something off that you think you should do today until tomorrow and possibly receiving a better outcome than if you were to tackle the task right away. It allows for divine planning to step in and create space for things to happen at the time it was truly meant for and with greater ease.
I’ll start with my procrastination roots… homework, especially essays. Anytime a teacher would assign a writing assignment or project with a delayed due date, it was my desire in class to go right home and get on that to make sure I didn’t wait until the last minute. Yet, almost every time, you could find me sitting with it at the kitchen table the day/night before plugging away. What did I do while I was putting off the inevitable??? Nothing of great importance, but I sure enjoyed the time either playing a game with a sister, going to the movie with a friend, or singing along to the top forty hits in my bed. Now here’s the interesting phenomenon…while I was doing all of these other "meaningless" this and thats, the assignment would be in the back of my mind lurking in my subconscious and taking shape. I will also admit that there was also the slight nagging feeling of impending performance, but I was usually having too much fun to care.
By the time I got to college, I truly tried to get a handle on it. I purposefully would set an hour up between classes to try and get things done for one class before the next one in an effort to avoid overwhelm. I even became one of those people that passed in assignments early. Those first couple of semesters freshman year only taught me that preparation might work fine for others, but it was not for me. My usual A/B work became C’s and D’s…turns out, doing the readings early left me space to forget what I had studied and for some reason the essays I wrote with such pride and early optimism would come back highly critiqued. My experiment with doing assignments right away had backfired and I didn’t have much time left over for fun.
As I struggled to find time to make new friends, I hit a place where I wanted to quit school and go do something more exotic, like floral arranging. Thankfully my parents were not on board with that plan and eventually after finding enjoyment in a communications class I changed my major, went back to my “procrastination ways”, and happily graduated with my friends while earning honors in a double major three years later. Turns out, my professors liked my essays better when they were being printed off of my word processor an hour before they were due.
One of those important essays I put off until the very end of the semester right before the holiday break. I only remember because it was the weekend of my work Christmas party and my boss at the time loved to take us somewhere special every year. She would rent a nice bus for the whole staff to go into the city to see a show and then get us dinner at a really fancy restaurant. Should I have gotten my 20 page paper done before that, yes…Did it haunt me a little while sitting on that bus, yes…Am I glad I waited, yes!
Turns out, as I was chatting about my dilemma and the fact that I had a shift the next evening, my colleague was complaining that she needed some extra money for the holiday as a single mom. Before we even got to the first part of our holiday adventure, she had eagerly taken my shift. I relaxed knowing I had a whole uninterrupted day to work on my paper, she relaxed knowing that she was getting some extra money that week, and we all had a great night. I even became inspired by the show we saw and reworked the whole concept of how I wanted to approach the paper and tie it together. It practically wrote itself the next day.
Procrastinating as an adult hits a little different. Sometimes it means getting other chores done that you had put off while you procrastinate some new thing. Sometimes it’s waiting to start dinner only to have your husband come home and surprise you with take out. Sometimes (as a teacher) it’s coming up with the perfect lesson plan for the day on the way to work. I’ve put off trips to the store only to find that when I finally got there, a new sale was out for an item on my list. I have even bumped into old friends by waiting to go to the hardware store.
I did a reading for myself recently about procrastination that opened my mind up about how I perceive this resistance energy. What I received was insight into how this is just our way of acclimating, a preparation for something that is coming but it is not quite time for yet. By putting it off we create extra space for it to come at the perfect time. It’s a precognition of an action or movement that is not quite ready but “coming soon”. I was reminded to relax and trust divine timing. Listen for the whispers of when it is time to move and then move, wait until you feel called to do the thing. Sometimes procrastination is just another form of intuition.
Most recently, I have been procrastinating my business plans. That usually leads to the next step of the puzzle coming into view. It’s how I found perfectly timed classes, received help with technology things I knew nothing about, and even came to publish these essays (something that I once felt I would never do). I take comfort in knowing that I am leaving space for the exact right thing to take shape while I give it space to form.
My husband and I have a never ending list of things to get done around the house. When it’s time to paint something I keep putting off there is usually a can of the color I want in the “Oops” aisle of our hardware store. This has happened too many times to count as a coincidence. The other morning in the shower I felt like it was a good day to paint the shed out back, and it was. We had it done in no time and for some reason when our son came home from work he wanted to help out too. If that is procrastination at work, then I am not going to stop anytime soon.
It makes me wonder…What other perceived weaknesses do we think we have that might actually be a superpower???