BOOK ... An Ode to the Thief of Time
In his new
book, Andrew Santella explores procrastination, and why it is that whenever
there is a job to do, you can count on someone putting it off.
Soon:
An Overdue History of Procrastination, from Leonardo and Darwin to You and Me
by
Andrew Santella, Dey Street Books, 2018
In
late 1934, a department store magnate named Edgar Kaufmann engaged Frank Lloyd
Wright to design a weekend home in the woods an hour or so southeast of
Pittsburgh. It was a huge boon for Wright — his reputation had waned,
commissions had dried up in the Depression, and his home and studio were
threatened with foreclosure. The architect visited the Kaufmann site, asked for
a survey, and then, the story goes, didn’t do a damn thing.
Nine
months later, Kaufmann unexpectedly visited Wright’s studio to look at the
design for his new home, which, he had been told, was progressing beautifully.
Wright reportedly put pencil to paper for the first time. Two hours later, he
presented Kaufmann with a plan for Fallingwater, an acknowledged masterpiece of
residential architecture.
“The
only way to explain the nine months Wright spent not working
on Fallingwater is by procrastination’s perverse logic. Nothing was the only
thing that could be done in such a situation,” writes Andrew Santella in Soon,
his engaging, meandering, and, of course, overdue exploration of the behavioral
tic.
Santella,
a sophisticated and widely published essayist who also coaches baseball at a
high school in Brooklyn, doesn’t claim to know why Wright procrastinated. But
he raises a skeptical eyebrow at our tendency to interpret such stories as
mysterious workings of genius. “This is something like what I tell my wife when
she finds me snoozing on the couch,” he says. “I may look like I’m taking a
nap, but I’m really writing. I’m always writing.”
It’s
clear to me that Santella knows the vagaries of procrastination firsthand,
because I, too, am always writing. Procrastination is so ingrained in me that
to deny it or to seek to exorcise it feels, to cite a faddish leadership term,
inauthentic. And I appreciate Santella’s refusal to try to cure me of my tic as
much as I support his disinclination to romanticize it.
Perhaps
there is no cure. As Soon shows, procrastination has survived
centuries of attack from a variety of institutions of social control, including
corporations and churches. In Armenia, in the fourth century, a Roman centurion
who had decided to give up his pagan ways and become a Christian met a talking
crow. The crow suggested the centurion take another day to think about it.
“Realizing that the crow was, in fact, the Devil in avian form arrived to tempt
him, the centurion — who would later be venerated as St. Expedite, patron saint
of procrastinators — did something remarkable,” writes Santella. “He stomped
the talking bird to death.”
A
millennium later, Italian business owners installed clock towers to regulate
their employees. “This is also when clocks began to tell us what we were
worth,” explains Santella. “From the beginning, these rising towers enabled a
new attitude toward time and the need to deploy it wisely.”
Fast-forward
500 years, and we encounter Frederick Winslow Taylor, the patron scourge of
procrastinators, who tried to eradicate our behavioral tic with the invention
of scientific management. Taylor, who was sarcastically nicknamed “Speedy” by
the workers at the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts, noticed that industrial
workforces were unable to move faster than their slowest worker. He called this
“soldiering” and dedicated himself to wiping it out. “Soldiering is related to
procrastination, in that the soldierer sabotages the efforts of the collective
the way a procrastinator frustrates himself,” writes Santella.
Jump
another 100 years and behold the era of the gig worker. “Now, entire sections
of Brooklyn and Chicago and Portland and Austin are populated almost entirely
by loitering freelancers — which is to say procrastinators,” observes Santella.
“The blithe dereliction characteristic of our contract economy has helped
normalize procrastination.” But Speedy must be spinning swiftly in his grave.
Perhaps
because writers tend to work alone, Santella doesn’t spend much time exploring the
effect of our procrastination on others. I suggest that responsible
procrastinators should try to avoid inflicting the wages of their sin on other
people. But I also know that irresponsible procrastinators wreak havoc on
schedules and drive their bosses and colleagues to distraction.
That
is the best reason for executives, who have likely spent their careers
completing to-do lists early and asking, “More, please,” to read Soon.
Better a devil you know than one you don’t.
by Theodore Kinni
https://www.strategy-business.com/article/An-Ode-to-the-Thief-of-Time?gko=34ea2&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=itw20180515&utm_campaign=resp
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