Brian Explains: Planned Procrastination

The main philosophy of planned procrastination is why do today what you can plan to do tomorrow?  I believe I started the beginnings of this philosophy in high school, but it truly blossomed in College.  I have a degree in English Composition that I am putting to great use by writing this article you are reading.  When I was in grade school, I did many book reports on books that I did not actually read or barely read.  The art of skimming a book and coming up with some BS for an essay on the book seemed to come naturally for me.  In high school, I was able to write original BS for which I got praised even more than the BS essays about someone else’s book about BS.  I decided that the BS skill could serve me well in a degree that may as well have been called an English BSing degree.  I always thought it would have been much more poetic if I had received a BS when I graduated rather than a BA.  Of course, I never really cared for poetry.  I saved the only two poetry classes that I was forced to take until my last semester at college.  One was reading poetry and the other was writing poetry.  As with everything else in my educational life, the BS poems that I wrote in minutes just before the class received much higher grades than the ones I spent days on making sure the pentameter, syntax, and rhyme (oh my) were just right.

How can planned procrastination help you?  Let me answer that question by asking you a question.  What could it hurt?  Give it a try.  You’ll like it.  Let me give you an example.  You are sitting at home and you get a phone call from your aunt asking you if you remembered that she invited you to her house for her birthday party in an hour.  You say, “Of course, I’ll be there.”  You hang up the phone and think, “This is why I didn’t want my aunt having my home phone number.”  After you calm down, you realize that you really only have a half-hour to get a present because it will take you the other half-hour to get out of bed, get dressed, brush your teeth and hair, and drive to your aunt’s house.  You go down to the closest store that sells cards, gift bags, and miscellaneous knick-knacks and slap it all together in your car.  As you are slapping it together, you realize that the card you bought is actually a “Get Well Soon” card.  Thinking quickly, you write inside the card something about being sick of birthdays or some BS like that.  You take the gift to your aunt’s house and she goes on and on about how creative the card is and how she always wanted a cactus shaped pot with a cactus in it.  Your family has an odd, but very real vote about how you are the greatest living relative and you live happily ever after.  What does this story prove?  Nothing really, but it does show that the procrastination (even though it really was not planned) did have a positive end result.

Who can benefit from planned procrastination?  Oh, just a small segment of the population known as everyone!  People spend hours, days, weeks, and even months planning things that are going to take place in the future.  People plan vacations, job interviews, and parties for what?  I say they are planning for big headaches, hours of frustration, and huge amounts of disappointment.  Why?  With planned procrastination, you let your subconscious mind take over.

Other people just want to help you organize your life by creating lists.  I am not offering you things you need.  I am offering you something you want – more time!  Have you ever thought to yourself, “I’d like to go to the movies today, but I have those things to do.”  Take that list of things to do and throw it out the window of tomorrow because, as I said at the beginning of this article, why do today what you can put off until tomorrow.  I know I said something along those lines.  I could look back and see exactly what I said, but I have a life to live.  I have to quickly finish this article so I can publish it in a few hours.  Now that’s planned procrastination!