The Negativity Surrounding Procrastination is Unwarranted

There's no doubt that procrastination affects us all. Our days are filled with a very limited amount of time, and within that time is a gap between what must be done, and what could be done another time.

Telling yourself that you will eventually return to a specific task and disappearing off into another suffers a common misconception that it is a negative mentality; a lazy one that results in little being done when it ideally should be. There's a problem with that, though: often enough, people will rush their tasks rather than taking their time.

For a creative or critical thinker, procrastination is an inevitable wall composed of lack of motivation, and a self-taught, self-critiquing mindset. The two go hand-in-hand as you tell yourself your idea, your work, or your potential is not up to people's standards, not up to your own personal standard. You stop, and you procrastinate.

While time is often precious, procrastination gives the mind time to think. Time to sit back, relax, and eventually return to the task that was left, only to approach it with new concepts and possibilities: it very much breathes new creativity. The result is a fresh mind that looks deep into what could work, and what may not work. A writer may have an idea for a story that is unique and filled with interesting and well-written characters, but that story may not flourish if its structure doesn't fit such a narrative; after some time, the fix could have very well been ensuring that the characters held meaning behind their actions, and the writer's time spent away from writing and procrastinating led to the consuming of other people's works and ideas as they discovered new routes within storytelling.

So how does one incorporate critical thinking alongside procrastination? It's a fairly simple answer: during your time spent avoiding a specific task, start another. Try different and new things. Broaden the mind with fresh concepts and practice your skills elsewhere. Improve and learn. Eventually, all that time spent practising and broadening the mind will result in hundreds of ideas, each which their own flaws and reasons for failure, and those failures will lead to something great. Something that you won't give up on, but will return to and edit and restart until it is finally finished.