302. Procrastination

I’m glad to have gotten around to reading an article from a few months ago about researchers who had finally gotten around to studying procrastination. These researchers at the University of Colorado surveyed sets of both fraternal and identical twins to assess their tendencies towards procrastination and impulsiveness. When the sets of twins finally took the survey and the researchers eventually looked at the results, they discovered that identical twins gave much more similar answers than fraternal twins did, indicating that our levels of procrastination and impulsiveness are determined by our genes.

What’s more – and this is very good news for procrastinators (which is why I only waited a few months to write about it) – procrastination and impulsiveness (the researchers say the two tendencies are related, but I haven’t gotten around to reading that part of their report yet) gave our ancestors an evolutionary advantage. So despite what your employer may say, procrastination is a good thing – we wouldn’t even be here without it.

One might well ask – someday — why this is; at the risk of going against my genetic imperative to answer some other time, I’ll go ahead and explain that by dinking around and putting off important long-term goals, our ancestors had more time to devote to day-to-day matters like eating and procreating. So while they fully intended to build the pyramids thousands of years before they actually got around to doing so, it’s only because their day to day impulses kind of got in the way. Still, the pyramids were eventually built and in the meantime, those who weren’t wasting their time figuring out how to move all those big blocks of stone got on about the business of propagating the species.

Though vital to our being here, today procrastination is frowned upon. Wives in particular seem put off by it. “When are you going to…?” “How often have I asked you to…?” “If you’d just get around to…” Sure, trash has to eventually be taken out, lawns occasionally need to be mowed, and brakes sometimes need to be fixed. But what’s the rush? And besides, sometimes if you wait long enough to do something, the need for it goes away.

The fact that women take a dim view of procrastination proves that its men, not women, who deserve the (long overdue) credit for the success of our species. Time, it has been said, is “God’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen at once.” Viewed in this light procrastination assumes a sacred dimension – by paying attention to our impulse to, say, watch a rebroadcast of the 1982 Hula Bowl instead of cleaning out the rain gutters, we men are slowing the pace of progress, preventing too many things from happening at the same time. In fact, if it weren’t for our tendency to procrastinate, humanity would have done everything it was put on this earth to do eons ago, and the world would have ended by now.

This is really great to know, and someday I’ll get around to explaining it to my wife. But first I have to remind her again to mail last year’s Christmas cards, shovel the snow off our sidewalk and hide the Easter eggs. Honestly, I just can’t understand why she puts so many things off…

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