Are you a diligent, responsible human who is exceptionally punctual in completing your tasks? Are you impeccable in doing what you had wanted without regrets or time delays? Are you increasingly interested in the dark side of doing things as you please instead of following stipulated/self-assigned schedules? Here are the important steps to follow if you want to relax, unwind and put a wrench in your daily work productivity.

Create schedules, but in mind

It is natural to write down schedules and stick it on walls (or) create it as reminders on your mobile calendar device to keep you motivated and alert. How does one alleviate the increasing stress of a well managed schedule? Well, it’s time for you to scrap schedules completely out of your walls and To-do/calendar apps. It’s time to make use of the best storage device that stays with you throughout your lifetime.

You might have remembered - at the end of class, your teachers would be reminding you about the activity they had discussed during the course of the class, in case someone slept through. Followed by that, they will use the common phrase - “Don’t forget to complete it by tomorrow’s class!”.

• Category A : will mark it on their notebooks.
• Category B : will make a mental note of it.
• Category C : won’t mind and leave the class.

When the time comes for homework, the Category A will complete the work on time and focus on their other activities. Whereas in Category C, we can isolate them into two types. One will contact their Category A friends and get clarified about the activity later. The second one might not be a great example in adult world - we can ignore it.

Now we come to Category B. Though Categories A and C can also have a higher possibility of procrastination, I have ignored them for the sake of explaining the ability of human memory. With regard to mental notes, the possibility of them popping into your memory will be greatly dependent on the surrounding circumstances. A satisfying bus ride back to home, or a fun activity after returning home - have consequences on the longevity of the mental note. However, this is a necessary evil to induce and amplify the effect of mental relaxation - something that is achieved when you complete a mentally taxing activity. The periodical distractions create an illusion of peace and quiet, allowing you to continue your day without worrying about the activity. Your mind will say to you: “Hmm, it might not be that bad. The relaxation has been great, and I don’t want it to end. Let’s try this tomorrow - with a fresh state of mind”.

In workplaces though, you might be asked to track your events in a daily calendar app. The event organizer also adds your email in their invitations, robbing you off any choice to ignore the notifications and reminders. Basically, it’s mandatory to attend such scheduled events. But none of these scheduled events are going to monitor what you do in your workplace. It’s either you (or) the one above you who is going to track it (only if you are in their constant viewpoint). This means that you kinda make your own mind-schedules for the work you would be doing on a daily basis. As an adult, various responsibilities and activities would have to be performed by you, which serve as conflicts to your inner-scheduling. Thus, at the end of the day, you will be left with the mindset of “Lets push this for tomorrow. Hope I can complete it then”.

Congrats! You have successfully stepped into the shoes of an amateur procrastinator. Before cursing your mind, remember that it was a coordinated attack influenced by soothing (or) grueling human emotions. Your hand and notebook (or) your calendar app were ready to track your activities. It was only you, who decided to postpone it to tomorrow with virtual post-it notes.

Set imaginary deadlines (subject to change)

Now that you have entered a comfortable state of mind to push the activity to a later date, here comes the important part.

You need to choose the date.

Now, there would be various lengths of time available for you complete an activity. Usually, it would be one day - at least in a learning institution setting. The example I gave above can be referred again for context. It can extend to a week, two weeks, or even a month depending on the holidays and other contexts.

As a dedicated gentle-person who wants to master the art of procrastination, it is an unforgivable sin to start the particular homework activity right at the start of the long stretch of holidays. It is totally natural to spend some time relaxing, after all the stressful time spent on classes and studies. But leaving the homework unfinished is not an option. Considering the possible consequences, you must decide on a personal deadline of when to stop the fun and start your pending coursework that needs to be submitted at the beginning of the next term/semester. However, once the day arrives for the deadline in the middle of the holiday period, you will be pondering about the decision you took. Whether it was the right thing to delay it this far? Shall I start working on it right now? Or is there any way I can delay it further without impacting the minimal time needed to complete your coursework?

Moving onto the workplace setup, your personal deadlines get bound to the work deadline. A newspaper publisher gets barely 24 hours to collect and publish all the news pertaining to the day. If they procrastinate and miss or fudge a key news, it will spell doom to their business. These days though, all they need to do is follow some “X”witter handles and type it as “news”, without caring about the truth of the matter. Since they have become so irrelevant these days, it is difficult for me to ascertain how much news they miss (I stopped reading newspapers long time ago, since I can access most of the news sources off internet).

In an average business institution, we do get fixed deadlines by the business. A target will be set, and each employee with their designated roles and teams will work towards achieving it. Usually, there is very little wiggle room for procrastination. However, there is an inspiring way to acquire the time for it in both educational and workplace setups. No, it’s not cutting corners. Let’s see it in the next passage.

Your self-confidence and self-belief needs a boost!

Even when you are not procrastinating, self-confidence is a key aspect in developing your future. It impacts what sort of decisions you might take in your life. It helps to overcome hesitancy and lets you choose the decision without any regret. A belief in your ability that you can do it - this is the key ingredient to a successful procrastination.

The deadline approaches closer, and you contemplate about starting your work now, or pushing the personal deadline even further. If you give in to the temptation and do your work, it gets completed, and you would gain mental peace too. But that’s about it. You will end the holiday/work cycle, just as a casual procrastinator. In order to move towards the legendary status - you need to strengthen your resolve, and start relying on your abundant self-confidence. Your mind voice should be: “I can do it, even if I push the personal deadline closer to the real deadline.” Even if there is just one day, or a few hours, you should have the confidence that you can finish it within the restricted time period (one which you imposed on yourself).

But how can you gain such self-confidence? A general understanding is that, self-confidence shouldn’t be senseless and baseless. Otherwise, you would just be making a fool of yourself. There are two ways to this.

• Acquire the skill via speed-running.
• Acquire the experience, and chunks of skill along the way (casual play).

As a beginner with neither of the above, it would be obvious that you will only have time to panic if you try to procrastinate. So, the approach to follow here if you don’t want to spend your lifetime gathering experience to just pass the time after retirement, is to overload yourself with information related to what you are working on, and try to make sense of the challenges you face as early as possible. Making mistakes is one of the side effects here, but according to the popular motivational quote, climbing the steps of mistakes will help you reach the peak of the hill(skill).

One question that might come out of the above info, is this. “If you make too many mistakes, doesn’t it affect your confidence in yourself about doing the work?” Yes it might. That’s why the path of the Master is being unraveled only by a select few. This is where having a strong self-belief comes in. Just blind self-belief will be sufficient to overcome the doubts on your skill gain (Not recommended if you are part of an MLM or something scummy).

Do “Selective” over-working

Either way, you have acquired the skill now. When you start working on the thing you have been working for a while now, you will start seeing certain efficient ways in which you could handle it, saving time and energy. Thus, you have mastered the key concept of master procrastination.

“Wait, isn’t that just smart work? How does that relate to some lazy fellow who wants to postpone the work they could do right now?”, you might think. Here is the ultimate difference between a smart worker and a master procrastinator. The smart worker employs the efficient techniques they discovered, saves their time, and works on other tasks in the meantime. The master procrastinator, on the other hand, looks at the work that’s provided to them, and creates a mind map of various efficient ways they could complete it. They then tend to calculate the estimated time they require to complete it, and keep it as a mental note too. And then… they chill!

Just postpone it to the next day, the day after that, the day after that day, until their estimated time for postponement comes to a close. Then what? They power through the work. Minimal breaks, possible late night overworking. But, they get the work done on time. Just like your common employee. Except that they spent the postponed times in the ways they wanted. Indulging in physical exercise, leisure and recreational activities as much as they could. They also manage to go under the radar of recognition so that they aren’t overburdened with more work and exploited by the higher-ups. While a smart worker manages to get more work done, their method of work can be defined as “gradual over-working”. While the master procrastinator gets more work done in a short period of his choice - something that can be defined as “selective over-working”, except that they don’t do more than the work they are supposed to do.

In the context of an educational setup, let’s imagine the smart worker as the person who tends to start the homework early on the vacation. Now as the winner of the homework race, they get to relax for the reminder of the vacation - until they start getting requests for help from their fellow friends and classmates in solving difficult problems. A form of additional effort well over what they had to actually work. In this context, a master procrastinator, will enjoy the vacation to their fullest. During the final days of vacation, they start their homework, and overwork themselves in the minimal period to get their job done. At the end of the day, both the smart worker and master procrastinator will submit the same work, with only the 2nd person having given nothing more than the required amount of effort.

Thus, a new master of procrastination was born!

Going beyond deadlines???

Is it still procrastination if you delay your work so late that it goes beyond the deadlines? No! Definitely not. That’s just being lazy. (This article was started on September 2 and finished on November 26. It stayed in draft for close to 3 months. But there were no deadlines for me to complete it on time, so…)

Congratulations if you read this fully in one go, right after opening the link, you have failed the Procrastinator test and must be a diligent smart worker. If you had read a little and planned to read it in parts later, you might have some innate skill for being the Master Procrastinator. If you cheated and skipped to the last part to see the ending, you might be 🎼 Just an Ordinary Person Procrastinator 🎼… Or you are just lazy. Or you didn’t want to waste your precious time. Which makes you, a smart worker… I guess?

(Disclaimer: This article has some satirical elements, with a dose of some Instagram Reels/YouTube Shorts/LinkedIn Posts/”X”witter Quotes Motivation. You may or may not take it seriously. Overuse of the term “procrastination” is regretted.)