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
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.
Theodore Kinni
https://www.strategy-business.com/article/An-Ode-to-the-Thief-of-Time?gko=34ea2&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20180710&utm_campaign=resp
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