How to Stop Time, By Anna Della Subinsept

Posted September 30, 2014

One of the capital sins is sloth that is closely associated with procrastination. It is also the antithesis of diligence, which is making the best use of our time with which God has blessed us. Diligence reminds us time is a gift from God that is precious and should be guarded jealously. The following article delves further into the topic of procrastination, reminding us it is costing our country trillions of dollars.

How to Stop Time

By Anna Della Subinsept

IN the unlikely event that we could ever unite under the banner of a single saint, it might just be St. Expeditus. According to legend, when the Roman centurion decided to convert to Christianity, the Devil appeared in the form of a crow and circled above him crying "cras, cras" -- Latin for "tomorrow, tomorrow." Expeditus stomped on the bird and shouted victoriously, "Today!" For doing so, Expeditus achieved salvation, and is worshiped as the patron saint of procrastinators. Sometimes you see icons of him turned upside down like an hourglass in the hope that he'll hurry up and help you get your work done so he can be set right-side up again. From job-seekers in Brazil to people who run e-commerce sites in New Orleans, Expeditus is adored not just for his expediency, but also for his power to settle financial affairs. There is even a novena to the saint on Facebook.

Expeditus was martyred in A.D. 303, but was resurrected around the time of the Industrial Revolution, as the tempo of the world accelerated with breathtaking speed. Sound familiar? Today, as the pace of our lives quickens and the demands placed on us multiply, procrastination is the archdemon many of us wrestle with daily. It would seem we need Expeditus more than ever.

"Procrastination, quite frankly, is an epidemic," declares Jeffery Combs, the author of "The Procrastination Cure," just one in a vast industry of self-help books selling ways to crush the beast. The American Psychological Association estimates that 20 percent of American men and women are "chronic procrastinators." Figures place the amount of money lost in the United States to procrastinating employees at trillions of dollars a year.

A recent infographic in The Economist revealed that in the 140 million hours humanity spent watching "Gangnam Style" on YouTube two billion times, we could have built at least four more (desperately needed) pyramids at Giza. Endless articles pose the question of why we procrastinate, what's going wrong in the brain, how to overcome it, and the fascinating irrationality of it all.

But if procrastination is so clearly a society-wide, public condition, why is it always framed as an individual, personal deficiency? Why do we assume our own temperaments and habits are at fault -- and feel bad about them -- rather than question our culture's canonization of productivity?

I was faced with these questions at an unlikely event this past July -- an academic conference on procrastination at the University of Oxford. It brought together a bright and incongruous crowd: an economist, a poetry professor, a "biographer of clutter," a queer theorist, a connoisseur of Iraqi coffee-shop culture. There was the doctoral student who spoke on the British painter Keith Vaughan, known to procrastinate through increasingly complicated experiments in auto-erotica. There was the children's author who tied herself to her desk with her shoelaces.

The keynote speaker, Tracey Potts, brought a tin of sugar cookies she had baked in the shape of the notorious loiterer Walter Benjamin. The German philosopher famously procrastinated on his "Arcades Project," a colossal meditation on the cityscape of Paris where the figure of the flâneur -- the procrastinator par excellence -- would wander. Benjamin himself fatally dallied in escaping the city ahead of the Nazis. He took his own life, leaving the manuscript forever unfinished, more evidence, it would seem, that no avoidable delay goes unpunished.

As we entered the ninth, grueling hour of the conference, a professor laid out a taxonomy of dithering so enormous that I couldn't help but wonder: Whatever you're doing, aren't you by nature procrastinating from doing something else? Seen in this light, procrastination begins to look a lot like just plain existing. But then along come its foot soldiers -- guilt, self-loathing, blame.

Dr. Potts explained how procrastination entered the field as pathological behavior in the mid-20th century. Drawing on the work of the British-born historian Christopher Lane, Dr. Potts directed our attention to a United States War Department bulletin issued in 1945 that chastised soldiers who were avoiding their military duties "by passive measures, such as pouting, stubbornness, procrastination, inefficiency and passive obstructionism." In 1952, when the American Psychiatric Association assembled the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -- the bible of mental health used to determine illness to this day -- it copied the passage from the cranky military memo verbatim.

And so, procrastination became enshrined as a symptom of mental illness. By the mid-60s, passive-aggressive personality disorder had become a fairly common diagnosis and "procrastination" remained listed as a symptom in several subsequent editions. "Dawdling" was added to the list, after years of delay.

While passive-aggressive personality disorder has been erased from the official portion of the manual, the stigma of slothfulness remains. Many of us, it seems, are still trying to enforce a military-style precision on our intellectual, creative, civilian lives -- and often failing. Even at the conference, participants proposed strategies for beating procrastination that were chillingly martial. The economist suggested that we all "take hostages" -- place something valuable at stake as a way of negotiating with our own belligerent minds. The children's author writes large checks out to political parties she loathes, and entrusts them to a relative to mail if she misses a deadline.

All of which leads me to wonder: Are we imposing standards on ourselves that make us mad?

Though Expeditus's pesky crow may be ageless, procrastination as epidemic -- and the constant guilt that goes with it -- is peculiar to the modern era. The 21st-century capitalist world, in its never-ending drive for expansion, consecrates an always-on productivity for the sake of the greater fiscal health.

In an 1853 short story Herman Melville gave us Bartleby, the obstinate scrivener and apex procrastinator, who confounds the requests of his boss with his hallowed mantra, "I would prefer not to." A perfect employee on the surface -- he never leaves the office and sleeps at his desk -- Bartleby represents a total rebellion against the expectations placed on him by society. Politely refusing to accept money or to remove himself from his office even after he is fired, the copyist went on to have an unexpected afterlife -- as hero for the Occupy movement in 2012. "Bartleby was the first laid-off worker to occupy Wall Street," Jonathan D. Greenberg noted in The Atlantic. Confronted with Bartleby's serenity and his utter noncompliance with the status quo, his perplexed boss is left wondering whether he himself is the one who is mad.