I am procrastinating finishing up today’s birthday post and was reading about procrastination instead. I found this in James Surowiecki’s “What we can learn from procrastination” in the current New Yorker. I think you should try this explanation the next time you miss a deadline.
You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch “How I Met Your Mother,” that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”
It’s an interesting essay, if heavy on the philosophy at times. Here’s one more sample to get you to put Surowiecki’s article on your reading list for later.
A similar phenomenon is at work in an experiment run by a group including the economist George Loewenstein, in which people were asked to pick one movie to watch that night and one to watch at a later date. Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing. This is why Netflix queues are filled with movies that never get watched: our responsible selves put “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Seventh Seal” in our queue, but when the time comes we end up in front of a rerun of “The Hangover.”
How did they see into my Netflix queue? It’s absolutely true that “Date Night” jumped the line over “Born Into Brothels” and “Precious.”