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The Round Tuit is an old joke, but it encompasses a near universal truth – most of us have long to-do lists of things which we should be getting on with but which mysteriously remain undone. There are all sorts of perils to this approach from the serious to the merely annoying, but however severe the potential consequences, human beings as a species remain master procrastinators. There’s a theory that procrastination may be a side-effect of evolution; our ancestors who stayed in the cave rather than heading out after the bison were less likely to be eaten by a sabre-tooth tiger, and so were able to propogate their genes. I’m not convinced by this, since the dangers of starvation would have been equally present, but procrastination is so widespread that it must serve some purpose (apart from the momentary pleasure of staying sat on your fat arse scrolling Facebook, which to be honest isn’t even all that as a pastime).
Not everyone procrastinates. Tim Urban famously produced a brilliant blog post about procrastination which drew two types of responses: the “But why don’t you just get on with it?” brigade, and the procrastinators, who struggled to explain just why this piece of advice was as helpful as telling your depressed friend to cheer up, and as likely to succeed. If only a Round Tuit was a genuine thing, but until someone invents it all of us hapless procrastinators have to rely on various hacks invented by other procrastinators in the absence of real life Round Tuits such as furious bosses, pissed-off parents, and straight-talking doctors insisting on discussing ominous test results.
This post, for instance, came about whilst I was relaxing in bed today during my purely theoretical* ‘Me Hour’ when I return to bed, after feeding the cats, with tea and porridge and relax for an hour, no more, reading the paper online, connecting with chums via social media and generally readying myself for my day before rising to exercise, drink my coffee and get on with my life admin now that I am retired and potentially able to get totally on top of everything on my To Do list. A WhatsApp chat with some friends led to a discussion of the Pomodoro Technique as a means of getting on with stuff. My own theory about the Pomodoro Technique is that it’s often the amorphous and unknown quantity of a largish task that causes us to procrastinate. We don’t know what it will involve or how long it will take, for which reasons we find it hard to envisage success, so we are reluctant to start in the manner of early man expressing a reluctance to trek off over the ice in a direction nobody has ever been before in the hope of eventually encountering a purely theoretical herd of mammoths which no tribe has ever hunted before, however wonderful said mammoth herd might be if it actually existed (and this theory, which is mine, makes much more evolutionary sense to me). The Pomodoro Technique forces us to stop thinking about the task as a whole and just to get on with it in bite-sized chunks. By the time we’ve completed two hours with a couple of stops for breath we have a much better idea of what the task will involve and how to do it, and, because we’ve just spent two hours getting on with it, we can envisage ourselves continuing. In the same way, I always find, once I’m actually out of bed, it’s really not that hard to get on with my day.
Oliver Burkeman, who I very much like, and I highly recommend that you sign up for his twice-monthly email The Imperfectionist, makes a living out of passing on life hacks with considered comment about why they work, or otherwise. To quote his latest email: “It’s been said that it’s helpful to think about the time it takes to complete a task as including all the time you spend thinking about doing it, or stressing about not having done it yet, as well as actually doing it. That helps clarify that acting immediately needn’t be thought of as a matter of becoming more self-disciplined or pushing yourself harder.” Those of us who have spent all too long in Tim Urban’s Dark Playground know the truth of this; time spent on the Refreshing Phone Email Again and Again Roller Coaster Thrill Ride is never as rewarding as time spent just doing the stupid thing, however hard we find it to believe. I know this from hard experience; every morning I remind myself that once I’m out of bed, I actually find being up and about achieving stuff a lot more rewarding than lying in bed scrolling through The Guardian’s Lifestyle section to see if they’ve uploaded any new articles in the last fifteen minutes, and yet, somehow, I never believe myself……
This week, in particular, I’m in serious danger of over-procrastinating to the point of idiocy. I’m retired, I’m quarantining so I’m on my own at home with absolutely no appointments which necessitate putting on clothes, and the only person who is going to get me out of bed is me. And in fact today I am out of bed – I’ve put the clean washing away, I’ve put some more washing in the machine, I’ve done a bit of tidying up, I’ve had a (pre-arranged) phonecall with a nice person carrying out the National Crime Survey, and I’ve written this blog post. I haven’t done my exercise or had a shower yet, but it’s only 12.30, after all. The day is yet young….. ish……… 🤨.
* The hour bit is theoretical. The lolling in bed dicking about on my phone is, sadly, not theoretical at all and generally lasts for, depending on how disciplined I am on any particular day, two and a half to three hours tops.