My intention for Bringing Lazy Back was to help my students to rest more, which I hoped would not only assist with their creativity but their procrastination as well. While I still firmly believe that rest is an important component of study in general, and in reframing procrastination behaviours in particular, the reading I have been doing has shown me that procrastination is multi-layered and complex. However, what is more distressing to me is that the current thinking about procrastination in education is still in the proverbial dark ages.
Personal responsibility vs hardwiring
Procrastination is largely seen as a personal or even moral failing rather than as an underdeveloped skill set or a learning difficulty. However, while researching Bringing Lazy Back, I found that procrastination is largely seen by behavioural psychologists as a form of executive (dys)function. Over and above this, that disabled students are more more likely to experience executive dysfunction than non-disabled students. This is largely due to certain pathways in the brain being disrupted because of factors such as poor mental health and trauma, as well as factors such as genetics and even the kinds of teaching you received as a child. Executive functions are a skillset that helps humans with the planning and setting of long-term goals, and they are usually developed over time using a method called Explicit Strategy Instruction. For students, explicit strategy instruction can be as simple as your teacher showing you how to break down a big project into smaller more manageable chunks so that it feels less overwhelming. In reflecting on this, I realised that I was never really given any tools like this at any point in my learning journey. It stands to reason that if I was not given these tools, many of my fellow students who procrastinate were likely not given them either.
Piers Steel, author of The Procrastination Equation writes that “Procrastination is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.” As someone who has struggled with procrastination for my whole life, this quote resonated very deeply with me. I don’t particularly want to be absolved of any blame for my behaviour, I am an adult. Yet time and time again I find myself procrastinating, particularly when it comes to academic work, and my time management in general is dreadful. Like a broken clock, I am at least 10 minutes late constantly. I have tried multiple old school methodologies to combat my procrastination, and none have worked. This has left me feeling disheartened and isolated: why is it so hard for me to do things on time, even when I want to do the thing in question? The answer seems to be a combination of factors, from fatigue (we are back to rest again) to disability and the fact that humans are just hardwired for instant gratification (the pleasure principle). I felt an immense sense of relief reading Steel’s work because it was the first time I read a piece of writing about procrastination that did not tell me to pick myself up by the bootstraps, nor did it use shame as a motivational tactic. It just gave useful methodologies and helped me make sense of my behaviour.
Helping students
I am not under any illusions that my SIP project will magically fix the problem of procrastination at UAL, I am nowhere near that naive. But, if it is possible for me to reframe my own thinking around procrastination and learn some helpful methods to either combat or harness it, I think it could greatly help my students to feel less stressed while completing their projects. As I said, most of the ways that we are taught to think about procrastinators is that they are lazy and that they don’t do the work on time or at all because they just don’t care. This does not late to my experience at all. Usually, if I am procrastinating about something it’s because it feels overwhelming, I have another task I see as more immediate, I feel I need more time to think about it, I have no idea how to start, I feel insecure about my ability to do the task well or as a chronically ill person who is regularly in pain and fatigued I would rather do something that gives me immediate joy like watch TV or see my friends than sit at my desk and write an essay.
Speaking of fatigue, procrastinating is exhausting. The scramble to get 3 months worth of work completed in 3 days has only become more and more wearing as my ability to pull all-nighters has decreased with age and disability.
To a certain degree, I do consider myself to be a person who thrives under pressure, but I am not sure how much that has to do with patterning based on my existing behaviour – making a virtue of necessity since I haven’t found a way to stop procrastinating, “if you can’t beat em, join em” – or if it is simply how I work best. It’s impossible to know for sure since I cannot remember a time when I did not procrastinate. However, I would be curious to test this during the course of my research if I have time.
If the research that I do for this SIP project helps me to improve, or at least understand, my own procrastination behaviours even a little, I will consider it a success. I also think that pivoting my subject to focus on procrastination will make it easier for me from an action research perspective. I anticipate that there is infinitely more written about procrastination in academia than there is about rest. This is likely a result of our hyper-capitalist fixation on productivity, but for once I might benefit from it.