Is Procrastination Good for Your Writing?

There is no real, direct “cure” for procrastination, but there might be ways of better understanding it so that we can all use procrastination to our benefit in the long-run.

With only a handful of hours left to write at least five pages and submit my last term paper of the semester, I’m finally getting started. My phone is less than a foot away from my grasp. It illuminates my fingers, which are pounding the backspace key every thirty seconds. My eyes are glued to the thirty tabs on my laptop browser while an iced coffee sheds its humid skin on the table.

This scene took place during the finals week of my junior year of college, but it wasn’t the first or last time I was deep in the belly of procrastination. While my papers for that semester were eventually submitted, I ended up getting some of my lowest grades of my college years. Although there were many factors that contributed to my exhaustion—including a severe cold caused by an overloaded immune system, late night study sessions, triple shot lattes, and working extra hours at my two campus jobs—I couldn’t help but think that I’d somehow “failed” because of my procrastination. Had I started earlier, I could have made some progress on my writing projects instead of neglecting them all semester.

In the years that followed my college graduation, I transitioned into teaching high school English and I no longer had the time to procrastinate. Like most educators, I worked sixty- to seventy-hour weeks, writing lesson plans and grading papers on the weekends. My personal writing goals, like putting together a poetry collection or the first draft of a novel, were sidelined for the eighty plus assignments that I needed to grade and the PowerPoint slides that I hastily created during my planning period. In my second year of teaching, I almost couldn’t imagine sitting down to write anything for myself—and even my journal entries became increasingly short and haphazard. One of my teaching mentors told me, “Take twenty to thirty minutes a day to read or write.” I sighed at what seemed like an impossible task. I was constantly surprised by how much writing I didn’t get done, even though I was teaching composition courses.

While this was a shift from procrastinating on academic essays, I realized that I was now procrastinating on my personal writing goals. The concept of writing to survive deadlines had followed me from my undergraduate days to becoming a secondary teacher and then a doctoral student. It was only during this past year that I started reflecting on what my procrastination looks like—and what it’s taught me about my writing process.

For so long, I saw procrastination as a means of survival. I thought it was necessary to procrastinate on my long-term writing goals so I could focus on more pressing tasks at hand. Today, as a doctoral student and college writing instructor, my procrastination takes many familiar forms: lesson planning before eating dinner at 9 p.m., answering emails before writing my term papers, getting reading done before finishing my laundry. When it comes to my own writing, I am especially keen to put off my personal goals and prioritize my professional ones: I’ll be elbow-deep in reading student essays before I approach my creative work.

In one of my recent writing seminars, we discussed what procrastination looked like for everyone. To no surprise, all of us admitted that we did it. Even as graduate students who have had years to hone our productivity habits, we all procrastinated on our writing to some degree. I realized that both novice and seasoned writers face several forms of procrastination, especially when they’re not motivated by impending deadlines.

For so long, I saw procrastination as a means of survival.

The ideas that you can just “sit down and write” or that “procrastination is a lack of willpower,” undermine the multitude of factors that affect writers. For example, some writers have more resources and privileges to avoid procrastination than others, whether it’s having an editor to keep you accountable for deadlines, or even just a quiet space to write. Additionally, there are several motivational factors involved with prioritizing writing. In my own experience, I’ve had an overwhelming urge to procrastinate because of perfectionism, suffering from the fear that a piece of writing might not turn out the way I hoped it would.

Perhaps there is another important question to ask: How can we be better interpreters of our own procrastination habits? In their article “Procrastination and the Extended Will,” Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson describe a common feature of procrastination: offloading. This is the ability to “transfer segments of our working memory onto the environment.” What they mean by this is that we can transfer our responsibilities onto other things (or people) in our environment to lessen the burden on ourselves. When we’re thinking about our writing lives, this could be as simple as having a calendar notification for every writing session or finding an accountability partner.

This idea of “offloading” moves away from the idea that procrastination has solely to do with a person’s willpower. It’s not just the innate desire to get writing “done,” but a constellation of supports that make writing a priority. For me, this idea has helped me crystalize the ways in which I can “offload” certain responsibilities such as scheduling, withdrawing money into my savings, and texting my writing group every week, so that I can truly prioritize my writing time.

Additionally, as a college writing instructor, I’ve often included self-reflection in my own pedagogy. From having students write annotations at the end of their essays to reflecting on their writing goals mid-semester, using reflection during all steps of the writing process has ultimately helped tackle students’ procrastination.

Some of my colleagues have taken it a step further and have implemented flexible deadlines and contract-based grading, meaning that the student makes a case for their own grade. Students are able to select their own deadlines, but with the knowledge that they will have to complete all of their projects at some point. These practices can help to open up the conversation about self-accountability and ask each individual to consider how they might prioritize their own work. More importantly, these conversations can help us get into our heads and interrogate the inner voice that nurtures our procrastination.

How can we be better interpreters of our own procrastination habits?

In his book Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, & How to Harness It, psychologist Ethan Kross describes how our inner voice “helps us control ourselves by evaluating us as we strive towards our goals.” That inner voice helps us stay on track, but can also speak to us when we’re most distracted. I try to wrangle this inner voice when I’m procrastinating. I ask myself questions such as: “Am I actually being productive while avoiding this task?” and “Is my perfectionism killing my writing?”

Thinking about not writing brings up feelings of guilt, shame, and avoidance. And thus a cycle is born. As Jane Burka and Lenora M. Yuen note in their book Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It Now, procrastination is a highly emotional process that perpetuates various “cycles of procrastination,” which are inner thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Even academic institutions and writing blogs have articles about how to tackle procrastination and get out of this cycle. But as I’ve thought more about procrastination, I’ve found myself asking: Should we be trying to eradicate procrastination, or are there some merits to letting projects sit for some time?

The time spent lingering on procrastination might be productive in the sense that it allows us to brainstorm and reflect on solutions that might actually help us in the long run. It might motivate us to take initiative and find a working “flow.” Many writers say that they produce their best writing under pressure, and that some of the most brilliant ideas come after periods of procrastination.

Creatively, what comes out of writing under pressure? The assurance that you can produce something adequate for the workshop that week? Or the patience to let a piece gestate for some time before looking at it with fresh eyes?

Perhaps what is most important is to acknowledge that writers from all backgrounds procrastinate on and prioritize various aspects of their writing. Learning what we prioritize as writers can lead us down intriguing paths and help us to understand our “inner voice.”

I believe it is worthwhile to analyze our relationship to procrastination and writing, and to learn more about our own inner voices and methods. Procrastination humanizes our writing process. It allows us to stop and breathe for a second, sometimes giving ourselves the grace and patience to continue onwards. And it allows us to acknowledge the beauty of waiting to write and the beauty of not writing.

There is no real, direct “cure” for procrastination, but there might be ways of better understanding it so that we can all use procrastination to our benefit in the long-run. Learning to reflect on moments of procrastination can prompt us to ask ourselves why we procrastinate. Are you feeling burnt out? Are you afraid to start your next writing project? Learning to differentiate these moments of procrastination will not only make you a better writer, but it might give you the inspiration to start something—one word at a time.