According to Ferrari, all these excuses are just the procrastinator’s tissue-thin front for what’s happening on the subconscious level: “The chronic procrastinator knows he’s presenting a negative image, but he’d rather be perceived negatively for lack of effort than for lack of ability,” he says. “Lack of ability is a stable attribute, but lack of effort is shifting—it means you could do it, you might be able to do it.” Maybe it’s the “might” factor that allows us finally to draw a line between procrastination and writer’s block. A block is thick, insurmountable, cast in stone, “as impenetrable as the Great Pyramid,” in Clarke’s words. Procrastination is a more pliant creature. When we defer a challenge until a hazy, ill-defined “later,” one might say that we devalue future time and belittle our circumstances in it; but you could also say that we are irrationally exuberant about the future—it becomes an ascetic, distraction-free idyll where all appetites have been permanently gratified, where minutes stretch out as luxuriously as hours, where all our creative prayers are answered. You might even call procrastination a perverse form of optimism.
Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, and the difference between writer’s block and procrastination. – By Jessica Winter – Slate Magazine
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According to Ferrari, all these excuses are just the procrastinator’s tissue-thin front for what’s happening on the subconscious level: “The chronic procrastinator knows he’s presenting a negative image, but he’d rather be perceived negatively for lack of effort than for lack of ability,” he says. “Lack of ability is a stable attribute, but lack of effort is shifting—it means you could do it, you might be able to do it.” Maybe it’s the “might” factor that allows us finally to draw a line between procrastination and writer’s block. A block is thick, insurmountable, cast in stone, “as impenetrable as the Great Pyramid,” in Clarke’s words. Procrastination is a more pliant creature. When we defer a challenge until a hazy, ill-defined “later,” one might say that we devalue future time and belittle our circumstances in it; but you could also say that we are irrationally exuberant about the future—it becomes an ascetic, distraction-free idyll where all appetites have been permanently gratified, where minutes stretch out as luxuriously as hours, where all our creative prayers are answered. You might even call procrastination a perverse form of optimism.
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