You Are Always Procrastinating Something

We live in such a hard work culture, where any sort of leisure is seen as a disgrace to your character, where any sort of “waste of time” is viewed as a vice. And what is this “waste of time” we speak of? 

Well, that means enjoying yourself. God forbid you kick up your feet and watch TV or play video games. Heaven fucking banish the one who chooses to spend their time taking a nap instead of working their ass off.

People will act all holier than thou and tell you to NEVER procrastinate, to never slack off,  to never stall around, as if doing so is the absolute bane of society.

They’ll tell you procrastination is a terrible habit and you dare not even think about it. You better keep busy, keep going to work. Yes, obey your corporate overlords, you worthless little office grunt.

But I’m here to tell you, quite the contrary, as the procrastin8r himself: that procrastination ain’t such a bad thing. And hey, if you don’t want to take that from some random lazy dude on the Interwebs, take it from the Lord Almighty himself, who literally made one of the Ten Commandments, the top ten moral laws of the universe to follow, he made one of those divine orders to “take a day off”. The Supreme Being and Divine Ruler of the Universe himself said that refusing to take a rest was literally one of the top ten most immoral things a person could do.
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And look I ain’t necessarily a religious man, I just find it rather amusing that people will stand n’ preach about what’s in the Bible in the same breath they tell you to “get back to work”, yet the Bible itself is full of verses

Hebrews 4:9-10 says: “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his.” 

It’s literally sacrilegious to NOT rest. Heck, in the whole creation story, what did God do on the seventh day? He took the day to rest. He took the time to procrastinate. He allowed himself the ability to do…absolutely NOTHING.

And he “created” us in his image. Admittedly, I’m not one to buy into the whole creation story and find it to be more keen to that of a fairytale than any legitimate doctrine of history. Look, I’m only using this point as a metaphor and perhaps illustrate what I’m trying to say more clearly to those of my readers who do hold faith.

Anyway, this isn’t some sort of religious debate I’m trying to bring up here, but case and point here is that taking time to rest, taking time to procrastinate and do nothing,  is not only acceptable, it’s a morally *good* thing to do.

And you know what? All this stigma against procrastination leaves out the very candid fact that it’s impossible NOT to procrastinate.

I mean, you don’t need to do nothing in order to procrastinate. You can be doing something while procrastinating another. Did you catch that?
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Okay, I’m gonna paint this picture for you straight: You are always procrastinating. Always.  You hear? 

You are always procrastinating something in order to do something else. That’s just the way it works. Speaking of laws of the universe, that’s one of them. 

You can’t avoid procrastination. Clean cut n’ dry.

Now you may think to yourself, “Oh no! I never procrastinate. I never do that. I’m always diligent.”

First of all, you shouldn’t lie to yourself. But alright, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say you actually remain quite active; you’re a bit of an eager beaver, a real go-getter.

You always get projects done as soon as they are assigned. You attend to chores right away and get done errands without hesitation. You’re always busy, always moving, always on the ball.

You don’t sit still.

And that’s what you’re procrastinating on! Did you catch that? One more time: YOU DON’T SIT STILL.

Do you see what you’re doing here? Do you see what your procrastination is.

See, it’s not a matter of IF you procrastinate (or not); it’s a matter of WHAT exactly you procrastinate eon.
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​’ll break it down for you, real simple: By consistently keeping yourself busy with busywork, you’re putting off “break time”, you’re procrastinating keeping holy the Sabbath day, you’re postponing time to rest.

And as we already covered, rest is a necessary and morally obligated thing you must do. You must take a rest. You must take it easy. You must put aside your chores, put away your work or school assignments and “have-tos”, then sit on back and…relax.




Relax. It’s something you have to do. Like I said, the big magical sky daddy himself did it. You can too.

You’ve been putting that off haven’t you? You’ve felt compelled to always get something done, never leaving yourself any time to just like…chill, once in a while.

You’ve gotten so wrapped up in your to-do list that you haven’t even looked at your wish list of things you want to do, things you enjoy doing.

Even  when you’re quote on quote “multi-tasking, you’re procrastinating another task, even for a brief few seconds to do another. You stop typing a paper to check your e-mail. You stop reading your e-mail to answer a phone call. You put the person you’re talking to on hold to look up something in the database.

These little “stops” you take while “multi-tasking” are little moments of procrastination. That doesn’t mean you aren’t doing *anything*. It just means you aren’t doing a specific something (while you go ahead and do a specific something else)

I put “multi-tasking” in quotes by the way, because face it, there’s really no such thing as multi-tasking anyway, I mean, let’s be real here. There’s focusing on one task versus rapidly switching between a bunch of them, but doing more than one thing at a time, which is what is often associated with the phrase “multi-tasking”, is nearly humanly impossible, unless of course you happen to be a circus acrobat, in which case I suppose that point is moot.

​​But for the most part, when it comes to multi-tasking, what you’re really doing is alternating between a subset of tasks in quick succession. You’re not doing everything in synch, per se. 
I mean,  I take it you’re not necessarily juggling knives and breathing fire simultaneously here, though I could be wrong. Maybe you are  quite the performer who holds an arsenal of amazing feats to stun the audience

But for the non-circus jugglers among us, when it comes to multi-tasking, fact of the matter is, we are putting off something (although quite briefly) in order to do another thing.

Procrastination is not wrong at its core. It’s just the natural way things are, given how time works, last I checked, anyway. It’s just wrong to consistently procrastinate the same thing over and over again.

And while you’ve already heard the tried and tired phrase not to procrastinate *too much* by doing things like sittin’ around nothin’, I’m here to tell you to also not to procrastinate *too much* on giving yourself the much needed and much deserved rest. Have a break. Transform into a couch. Don’t do shit!

The key phrase here is “too much”. Balance is key. While you don’t want to procrastinate rest, you also don’t want to procrastinate productivity TOO MUCH.

And that my friend leads us to choosing how to procrastinate decisively, or a phrase I like to use called “Procrastinate with Purpose”.

Since we already covered that no matter what you do, you are always, always, always procrastinating *something*, you must realize that you have the power to deliberately decide what that thing you procrastinate on.

None of this: “Oh I was supposed to finish writing my report, but I wound up binge watching Netflix instead”

Wound up? Wound up? No, you shouldn’t have “wound up” doing anything.

I don’t mean to tell you it’s wrong to binge watch Netflix. I don’t mean to say that taking a nap over washing the dishes is a bad choice.

What’s wrong is the fact that you didn’t have control over your actions and “wound up” doing something completely different than you had planned or anticipated.

You must procrastinate with purpose, never winding up doing anything.

And again, I can’t stress enough: it’s okay to rest and lay on the couch while “procrastinating” on getting work done.

It’s even okay to procrastinate laying on the couch so that you *can* get work done. What I really want you to understand is that procrastination is just sort of one of those inevitable things in life. It’s not good. It’s not bad. It just is.
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​Procrastination is the art of putting something off ‘til later. It’s really the heart of time management.

Do what you want though. Procrastinate on the things you want to procrastinate on. 

Never “wind up” doing something you were going to procrastinate on. Procrastinate with purpose. I’ll say it again. Procrastinate with purpose.

That said, don’t always put off rest, either. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t *always* have to be busy. God, I mean so many people are making themselves busy just for the mere dear sake of being busy.

Be aware of what you are putting off. Awareness is the first step. Consciously choose to put off writing that important work e-mail, so you can go play some video games. Deliberately decide to eat nachos instead of going to the gym.

Whatever path you choose, embrace it man. None of this complaining about how you “shoulda” got something done.

Either do it or don’t, but don’t worry about it. Don’t fuss over it.

If you decide not to complete your assignment, just remember you’re acting like quite the deity by taking time to rest.

Be a procrastinator now, so you can live a happier life later.






Take it easy,


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