The ‘How-To’ Guide to Procrastination

The ‘How To’ guide to procrastination: an instructional piece of writing.

Procrastination, n. A putting off; delay; hesitancy to act.
Word family: procrastinate, v. To put off doing something, procrastinator, n. A person who procrastinates.
Procrastination: dawdle, delay, drag, linger, stall, tarry.

Anyone can procrastinate. School students, office workers, accountants, even writers. It is a relatively easy task, all you need is something you must do. You can have a deadline or unlimited time, which is recommended for serious procrastinators.

Being an experienced procrastinator, I am going to (after much consideration), let you in on some of our secrets. There are strategies that may assist in fulfilling your aim to be a procrastinator but I must advise that they are not always successful (especially if you already have procrastination tendencies).

This advice is mainly for school students with a writing task in mind but can be used by anyone with a weak will.

The first and most important step towards becoming a professional procrastinator is that you must never, ever do a task when you receive it. This completely defeats the purpose of procrastination. I will explain with an example. If you receive an assignment on Monday and it is due in a week, let it rest comfortably on your desk (or better, on your floor) and then suddenly discover it on Sunday morning. Act surprised and stunned telling your parents that you, being a normal human and therefore possessing the natural characteristics of forgetting, that it did not occur to you throughout the week. In reality, it occurred to you a number of times but you conveniently found more interesting ways to fill your time.

Once you do actually build up the stamina to begin, waste five to fifteen minutes ‘getting ready’. This involves switching on the radio or CD player (the radio is preferred by most professional procrastinators because it is just so much more distracting), take an excessive amount of time choosing a pen and never find a clean sheet of paper when needed.

If you happen to be using a computer (which is a marvellous tool for serious procrastination), numerous tasks can be completed before you begin. You can change your computer settings to make your workspace colourful (and your concentration span just a little less), open up music files that always have a prominent beat and most of all, take your time choosing a font for your heading. Fonts are a procrastinators dream. It is their mission to experiment with every single one at some point. And them you have Wordart. This consists of a wonderful collection of wavy lines, straight lines, vertical lines, font colours (custom made ones too - I won’t go there), shading, borders, boxes, triangles, hearts…This list is amazingly endless.

If you come dangerously close to beginning, you could always attempt a fun-filled game of Solitaire or computer Hearts. Hearts is a mind-stimulating game but if you are anything like myself, you will become unnaturally frustrated, argue with your computer-created friends (ahem…opponents), wonder curiously how a computer can defeat you effortlessly and click the cancel button with unnecessary force.

Of course, there are many career paths that can be involved in becoming a serious procrastinator. You could be a bank teller operator or a postal worker. I often ask myself why our mail arrives (from the same person) at 10am one day and 2pm the very next. They may have excuses but this just happens to be a fine example of perfect procrastination. But if these don’t appeal to you, there is always any association with public transport at all to consider.

It is very disappointing to the procrastinator, but you must start writing eventually. But remember, once you start writing, your thoughts must wander constantly and you must always sing along to the songs you are listening to. And don’t forget to incorporate the song lyrics into your writing - this is a common characteristic of procrastinators.

So, as you can see, procrastination is relatively simple and can be achieved by almost anyone. But, I must warn you, it is not recommended for those confused, organised people who have everything completed unbelievably soon after they receive it (they tell me it’s something called ‘self-motivation’).