“Procrastination is the thief of time,” my father was fond of quoting, when he caught me spending happy hours in front of the mirror trying out new hairstyles when I should have been revising for my O levels.
Another favourite phrase was: “Never put off till tomorrow what you should have done the day before yesterday.”
It is a fact of life that there is always something you’d rather be doing than the thing you should be doing, and most of us indulge in procrastination from time to time. When we move house we may feel mild shame that there are curtains still unhemmed and a bare light bulb still without a shade. That is nothing compared to the true procrastinator. She lives permanently with boxes of books and miscellaneous items that she intends to unpack at the weekend. Years go by and the books are still in the packing cases, the shelves still empty.
The procrastinator has a compulsion to engineer delays, which can be maddening for her partner and agony for her children. Five minutes before her train is due to leave, she disappears to make a phone call or buy a paper, leaving her family aghast on the platform. On holiday her children are lined up ready for the beach with their buckets, spades and shrimping nets, when she says: “Let’s just have a quick cup of coffee before we go.” By the time they get to the beach, the tide is in and there is no beach.
Procrastination leads to frenzied last-minute activity, burning the midnight oil the night before an exam, or a mad scramble to pack for a holiday half an hour before departure. In the car on the way to her sister’s wedding, the procrastinator is turning up her hem and stitching a rose on her hat.
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Writers know procrastination as “displacement activity”. They do anything to avoid the task: read the sports pages of yesterday’s paper or rearrange the books on the shelf in alphabetical order.
The procrastinator may not be able to kick her habit but she can convert it from destructive to constructive use. When she can’t face doing her accounts, she can find a useful displacement activity: tackle the ironing, water the window box, weed the garden, clean out a drain or sew on that button that she meant to do a month ago.
For the procrastinator’s family, the secret of happy relationships is to accept that she’ll never change and to organise life accordingly. They can tell white lies about departure times and, while she goes through her delaying rituals, instead of exploding with frustration they should make sure that they are equipped to kill time, getting out the Su Doku page for themselves, and paper and crayons for the children .
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E-mail Jane for advice on your tricky relatives at body&soul@thetimes.co.uk