The Microsoft Word cursor blinks, waiting for the next input to be typed, in vain. However, no letter, no space appears on the digital file. Your mouse scrolls up the screen to an already open Internet browser window and clicks to refresh a news website— relegating the open Word document behind the news page, out of your sight. An open tab next to the news website’s leads you to your own university’s online-library database; the one next to that leads you to PhilPapers; and the one next to that leads you to an Amazon page with a list of books and household items in your shopping cart. It’s 11:30 p.m., by the way: You told yourself you’d just need to finish this paragraph before going to bed, to see the argument so convincing in your head unfold in its persuasive force unto a medium anyone can read. You click away from the news, back to the document, then jump onto PhilPapers—did you check all the possible objections to your argument? Are you sure your definition makes your argument distinct enough in the field? You really need to be certain before committing your words to paper, after all.
Anybody familiar with procrastination will have some idea, likely not so deeply buried in their mind, as to why they are procrastinating. In my own experience, procrastination has somewhat of a twofold nature. On the one hand, those things we procrastinate on tend to be quite significant to us, whether we like it or not. The submission of a chapter or review for work, the filing of taxes, the clearing up and closing of one’s home before leaving for vacation are hard deadlines, often unavoidable unless severe costs are paid. On the other hand, what we procrastinate on often consists in activities of a smaller scale, if you will. Wiping your desk, looking up a recipe, reading the news, even grading assignments or just scrolling Twitter, BlueSky, or LinkedIn —these actions may not have quite the weight of those we procrastinate on. They are often more narrow, not as meaningful, or sometimes—like mere doomscrolling—borderline mindless. For the most part, in the face of those important tasks you are procrastinating on, they are a sheer waste of time. You understand that the activities you are procrastinating on are more important. But what makes procrastination both negative and enticing, despite its irrational nature?
The concept of akrasia, which received quite a bit of attention in post-Aristotelian philosophy, seems to fit quite aptly what it is to procrastinate and why it is not something people typically value. Aristotle describes akrasia as a conflict between an agent’s appetite and their better judgment: The akratic lacks the virtue of self-control. It is not clear whether Aristotle himself saw akrasia as a merely psychological phenomenon or as a morally relevant character trait. However, insofar as we take self-control, or a clear degree of control over one’s own action, to be an aspect of human autonomy, it is hard not to see its moral importance. This is one of the most crucial aspects of Harry Frankfurt’s influential account of autonomy. In his view, to be autonomous requires the capacity to develop and act upon not just your desires but your desires about what you desire: not just to ponder and act upon your desire to doomscroll, but to consider and want to want, or not want, to doomscroll. Human beings, in this view, are capable of reflecting upon their own desires and of developing a mastery over what they desire. If you would only follow your own desires whenever you want something, without the capacity to refrain from them, that would make you what Frankfurt calls a wanton and severely impaired in your autonomy. In this strand of thought, procrastination is not just an instance of akrasia, where we know what we ought to do and what we should desire to do, but choose to not pursue that end regardless. That does not make you a wanton, but it would signal a failure in your autonomy, with your appetite, as Aristotle would call it, superseding your better judgment.
While persuasive, in my view, there is something not quite right with this view of procrastination. For in my own experience, and that of many others, procrastination does not involve mere “low-intellect” activities like Aristotle seemed to imply. Sometimes one procrastinates on what one ought to do by doing other things one ought to do regardless: postponing writing a chapter by reading more literature, pushing away a deadline by clearing your work desk out of clutter, delaying deep cleaning your bathroom by walking your dog or playing with your pets. The Aristotelian and Frankfurt-inspired reading of procrastination implies that the activities you procrastinate with are indulgences, following simple and morally neutral—if not somewhat sinful—desires. But this picture does not account for procrastinating on pressing tasks by doing other still pressing tasks—something that author John Perry even proposed to weaponize for enhancing productivity, the art of structuring procrastination.
An alternative, then, would be to focus upon the importance of what we procrastinate on rather than upon what we procrastinate with. Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s theory of human needs supplies an interesting insight in this context. Namely, Maslow proposed that human beings’ needs can be categorized through a hierarchy of sorts, with those lower in the hierarchy needing to be satisfied before those higher up. Physiological needs need to be satisfied before we can achieve needs related to safety—of our bodily integrity, available resources, and social relations. Satisfying those needs allows us to pursue needs of a social kind—developing friendships, trustworthy relationships, and looking for emotional comfort and a sense of belonging. We can then turn to satisfying needs related to our (self-)esteem and the desire to achieve a degree of confidence, independence, feeling worth or at least useful. And finally, at the top of the hierarchy stand our needs for self-actualization, self-fulfillment, and developing into the person we want to be. In this context, procrastination may not be seen as a matter of vice but as a matter of need. Rather than intellectual laziness or lack of self-control, to procrastinate means to meet some of our more “basic” needs. It means to prioritize the building of more solid and tangible grounds to feel more secure and stable in our standing as people before being capable of achieving higher and more meaningful goals. Procrastination, here, is not quite a negative attitude but an expression of our fragility.
Yet again, this does not seem to be the whole story. For one, while Maslow’s hierarchy of needs seems intuitive at a first glance, it is not quite clear to what extent any activity we procrastinate on—or procrastinate with—ranks higher or lower in the hierarchy. Is to keep your apartment tidy a lower need related to feeling secure in your own environment or to esteeming your own home as a welcoming place? Or is it an affirmation of yourself as somebody in control? Is to grade an exam a need related to ensuring your basic needs are met by doing the job you’re supposed to or to the expression of a social need as an educator and mentor by choice? It seems that the activities we need—or feel like we need—to do are not quite as easy to tidily rank; rather, depending on your own preferences, situation, and character profiles, what you choose to procrastinate on and with might have quite different kinds of valence.
There is one concept that, implicitly, is often associated with procrastination: deadline. I personally find it grimly humorous how this term binds the (perceived) necessity of a task, often imposed from outside our own volition and death. Once you reach the deadline, either you’re ready or there is no coming back. I have a feeling that, of all activities, those that have a deadline, especially when externally imposed, are the most likely source of procrastination. And while I normally don’t take the etymology of a word to be particularly informative of its respective concept’s meaning, I find it fascinating that the most likely source of procrastination is associated with death. Many members of the existentialist tradition, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Sartre, see death as an inevitable source of meaning for human beings. Heidegger’s philosophical anthropology viewed the human being as being-towards-death, capable of realizing themselves only from the awareness of their own finitude. In contrast, Sartre argued that only from the awareness of their own mortality is it possible for human beings to develop responsibility for their own life.
In my view, and in line with this existentialist tradition, it is exactly in the link between responsibility and death that shows what makes procrastination philosophically interesting. While we might procrastinate on many kinds of tasks, I think they share one thing: They are things we (think we) ought to do. Not only that: We procrastinate not just on things we think or know we ought to do but on things that, more or less clearly, we know are inevitable. The deadline, which often characterizes those activities we procrastinate on, signifies the inevitability of a duty, of a responsibility we must take on or else face the consequences. If the deadline signifies inevitability, an inevitability we have to deal with one way or the other, then to procrastinate is to act as if avoiding, not recognizing, not accepting this inevitability. What makes procrastination interesting to me, as a philosopher, is that it implies a desire to avoid responsibility. Not only despite our duty or even our rational understanding of taking responsibility, but also despite the inevitability of the consequences that will follow our actions. We all know what it is to face an important deadline that cannot be postponed, just as much as we know that, one day, we are going to die. That day comes for us all, but while we cannot change that, we can adjust our behavior and prepare to meet that day. And just as we can choose to not think about our death and to think about how we want to live, knowing that deadline will come, so, with our taxes, we can procrastinate till midnight of the day before, even though, just like death, they are inevitable.
Giacomo Figà-Talamanca is a PhD student in political philosophy and philosophy of technology at Utrecht University and a member of the ESDiT (Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies) consortium. His research primarily deals with the legitimacy conditions of global technology governance, with a particular interest in the legitimacy of semiconductor and cloud governance. His other interests include theories of embodied, scaffolded, and extended cognition, as well as philosophy in a public and non-academic context.
