A New Time: Intentional-Procrastination
My puzzle board fell down. It was at its halfway point. All the pieces dropped as if any truck had unloaded some not-so-heavy dumps. I had nothing much to do. I packed everything in its long tin container. It got into a short oblivion. It happened a few months ago.
A few days ago, I repetitively tried to avoid any signs of procrastination. But it just peeked in with its usual captivating, overpowering moments. I had that feeling, “Let’s stop pretending…I don’t want to do anything.” And I did that. I did nothing ‘productive’. The weather was also very gloomy, and it mended well with my not-so-interested state. During the afternoon, I again opened that closed tin of oblivion. I started that puzzle. It’s a dock picture. Everything looks busy and ‘productive’. I started searching for one corner. I moved the piece slowly and it gave the board the shape of momentum.
And that was not a typical dumb time. I did not have any reason to call that not-an-engaging phase or procrastination time; rather, it recovered my slump and shaped it to allow changes in my regular responsibilities. In short, I needed that procrastination time. And if I look deeper, that kind of small time wheeled my slack into a new planning phase. That evening, I opened my reminder list without seeing any changes in my heartbeat.
We deal with larger plans to avoid procrastination phases. And the planning phases and practice phases take dominance in our minds. The least important one tries to make a way for the better scopes to live in secret. These three Ps are linked and ‘procrastination’ often overlaps and tries to run ahead of those other two Ps. Hypothetically, on average, the two Ps ‘planning’ and ‘practice’ have designated spaces and they at least get 80% attention in total, but there’s a wink; all together they work 20%. The secret, cunning P ‘procrastination’ gets 20% attention, and that too because we fear its tempting invasion. But it comes with 80% work in disguise of watching reels, scrolling, gossiping, and even searching for motivational content. But if ‘procrastination’ is trapped in intentional mode, if we happily give 10% procrastination time then what can happen? What will happen if we create intentional-procrastination time?
In 2012, the psychologist Benjamin Baird and his colleagues put the idea of “incubation paradigm to assess whether performance on validated creativity problems (the Unusual Uses Task, or UUT) can be facilitated by engaging in either a demanding task or an undemanding task that maximizes mind wandering.” The result shows, “The benefits of performing the undemanding task during the incubation were striking, with these participants showing a 40% rise in the creativity of their ideas for the questions they had previously considered.”
I feel we should choose those undemanding tasks on the basis of our inclination on that specific day. It’s better not to put these things in a particular planning zone. Leisure time can be planned but what you want to do at that time, let your mood decide. I felt like picking a puzzle that day so I accepted that. May be on another day, I would just watch funny videos or scroll down aesthetic reels. The acceptance of this indecisive feeling is not chaotic; it rather creates open space for some new creative boosts. I call this acceptance Ina*. Our minds pick up some great deals from just a few wander steps; we just need the acceptance.
(*In Sanskrit, Ina (इन).—a. means determined or anything that is powerful.)