Hi. My name is JB, and I'm a procrastinator.

(I’ve decided to allow comments from everyone because it seems everyone has something to say about this topic. Don’t make me regret it.) - JB.

I’ve wasted years of my life on time management. Or maybe not wasted. More like… misapplied or even… mismanaged. Yes, that sounds right. I have mismanaged years of my life messing around with time management hacks.

I suspect I’m not alone.

I didn’t want to write about this because it’s deeply embarrassing, but Friday’s enforced day off to get over my Covid booster gave me a chance to do some reading and thinking I wouldn’t normally do.

I mentioned earlier this year that I wouldn’t be making New Year’s Resolutions because resolutions are the crack pipe of the diffidently motivated. Except I said ‘muntivated’ because sometimes I like to make up words.

Either way, the point stands.

(Another point? Standing just off to the side, smirking at me like a smug little chucklefuck? How weird and uncomfortable it feels to contemplate the idea of New Year’s resolutions in late March, let alone the resolutions themselves, which have all died of neglect by now).

If you click back to early January, you might remember I vowed never to resolve anything, especially at New Year, but I thought it wouldn’t be terrible if I could lay down some new habits for myself. Specifically, starting each workday with a checklist - something to bring a little focus and rigour to the structure of my morning.

Yeah, look, not so great.

I did my checklist. I did it every day. And yet, this year was starting to look a helluva lot like last year in the way both so eerily resembled a gigantic bin fire.

This is the point in the column where I take a deep breath and make some difficult admissions.

I am a procrastinator. I always have been.

I was the kid in high school and later the student at uni who’d be up at three in the morning punching out his assignment on deadline, or long after it, because I’d leave the wretched thing until the last moment.

So? Big fucking deal. Most kids are like this. Three-quarters of college students, according to the studies. And there have been plenty of studies. I read a lot of them last Friday.

Most people grow out of it too. Or, I suspect, they graduate from the permissive environment of education and into the repressive hellscape of paid employment where the freedom of fucking around is replaced by the ugly reality of finding out; specifically, your boss finding out they hired a lazy, disorganised nitwit, and you finding out what it’s like trying to live on welfare in the punitive era of late stage capitalism.

However, about a quarter to a fifth of us don’t grow out of it. Did I mention that I’m not a kid in high school anymore?

Some of us muddle through by constructing heavy steel scaffolding around our work days to force some structure on them. Checklists, the Pomodoro technique, writing apps that delete your fucking manuscript if you don’t keep up with a set word count, Japanese deadline cafes that take you prisoner until you file your story, and so on.

And even with all that, some of us suffer from such debilitating and chronic procrastination that psychologists label it as self-harm.

That’s me, fam. Always has been. But it’s been especially bad the last few years, since Covid and that stay in hospital for suspected lung cancer. We could get into it if I stretched out on the therapy couch and you wanted to sit in a darkened, quiet room with me for fifty minutes once or twice a week for the next couple of years. But frankly, I can’t afford to pay you the APA rates for that, so you’ll have to sit there today while I type at you.

Procrastination which rises to the level of self-harm, is not, it turns out, a time management problem. It is instead a problem of emotional regulation. Or really, the lack of it.

I’ve spent thirty years researching the best time management tools available. I could write a book about them. Indeed, I have.

But what time management books won’t teach you is to that manage your time, you have to manage your feelings because it’s those treacherous motherfuckers that’ll bring you undone.

Procrastination, at least in my case, and almost certainly in yours if you suffer from it, is not an application failure or a shortcoming in your skillsets. It is you and me trying to protect ourselves from ourselves, to hide from the anxieties and fear which arise from those stresses which are with us all the time—“Can I pay the bills this week?”—and those which come to visit on special occasions.

“Oh, look! It’s the due date for my 120 000 word manuscript!”

Procrastination is what happens when we have to confront the tangled ganglion of fear and anxieties living in our heads and hearts by working on whatever the hell it was we were supposed to do today.

That shit hurts.

It feels terrible.

Do you know what feels about a thousand times better than confronting that shit and doing something about it?

Not confronting that shit and inhaling about six hours of Netflix instead.

At least, it does for a while. But around three or four o’clock in the afternoon, when there is zero chance that we can pull the baby back into the boat, then it all comes due, doesn’t it? That’s when the procrastinator starts to feel the genuine harm they’ve done to themselves.

Is there an escape from this hell?

Maybe.

I’m trying some stuff at the moment. I still have all of my time management scaffolding in place because that stuff is essential. But the tools only work if you use them.

So as I approach my work each day, I’ve begun to think about what lies ahead in two ways: as a time management challenge and also as an emotional task.

I’m trying to accept that the fear of fucking it all up in some way will be with me most days because fear and anxiety are part of the human condition. But it’s also human to adapt and overcome.

These are my adaptations.

Before I get anywhere near my work, I check in on how I’m feeling. If there’s any kind of stress or anxiety there—like a looming or blown deadline—I recognise and acknowledge it.

I try and understand where it’s coming from and fit it in with all the other feelings punching on inside of me. And when I’ve got that shit sorted, I try and get on top of it.

How?

Man, this is awkward, cos I feel like a fucking hippy.

But I, ah… I meditate.

Just ten minutes at the start of my workday. I plug into one of the guided meditation sessions on Apple Fitness, and usually one focussed on ‘calm’.

No one was more surprised than me when it helped.

However, not everyone will have access to the fruit company’s spendy products, and most meditation apps are pay-to-play. Some of them are grossly scammy and targeted at the insecurities of the neurodivergent. So fuck those guys.

This one, however, Mindshift from Anxiety Canada, is a free public resource and pretty damn cool. Bless those Canadians. Grab whatever flavour you need for your phone or tablet and get chillin’.

I do my ten-minute brain cleanse at the start of the day and then three minutes at the beginning of each 50-minute-long Pomodoro session throughout the workday.

I don’t know why, but it does help.

There are some other tricks you can play on yourself. If you have trouble starting, a potent one is to cosplay competence.

Ask yourself, as though you have no intention of working, you’re just, you know, pondering and stuff: ‘If I was the sort of person who got my shit done on time, what small, practical thing would I do next on this stupid project’.

And then do it, obvs.

I find that one very useful, along with imagining being done in a couple of hours. As Dorothy Parker is supposed to have said, but probs didn’t, “I hate writing, but love having written.”

Should you need a little push at the start of the day, it can give you one to imagine yourself feeling smug as fuck at the end, adult beverage in hand, your just dessert for having disposed of your day like a goddamned grown-up.

I hope these insights help you.

They’ve been very good to me so far.

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And here’s a little encore content. As I type these last lines and get ready to post, knowing that after this, I have to move on to a book project that’s been griefing me like a sentient fucking YouTube comment, I can feel my anxiety levels creeping up again.

So you better believe that before I get into that, Imma check in with my Chillax King, Christian, for ten minutes of calming the fuck down.