Soon

  Dedication

  For A-L

  Epigraph

  Let’s shuck an obligation.

  —John Berryman,

  “Dream Song 82: Op. posth. no. 5”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1: Barnacles

  2: Madness to Defer

  3: Saints, Crows, Poets, Priests

  4: A Brief History of the To-Do List

  5: On the Clock

  6: Seeds

  7: Therefore Bind Me

  8: Not Yet

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Barnacles

  My father . . . proposed that I should become a clergyman. He was properly vehement against my turning an idle sporting man, which then seemed my probable destination. I asked for some time to consider.

  —Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin

  Even a procrastinator has to start somewhere—if he’s going to start somewhere—so let’s start with Darwin.

  Charles Darwin spent much of 1837 drawing, jotting, sketching, and scribbling in one of a series of pocket-size leather-bound notebooks he carried around London with him. Each notebook shut with a small metal clasp, like a diary.

  He was living then in rented rooms in a house on Great Marlborough Street, not far from the Athenaeum Club, where rising literary and scientific men gathered to murmur great thoughts to one another amid neoclassical statuary. Darwin had just been elected to membership. One of his new clubmates would be Charles Dickens. I had guessed that the two must have met at some point—you know: Dickens, Darwin, both named Charles—but as far as I can tell, there is no record of it. I like to imagine them in conversation, bewailing the government or the food at the club.

  Darwin was just twenty-eight then and had recently returned from a nearly five-year circumnavigation of the globe aboard the HMS Beagle, a trip that had made him a minor celebrity in scientific circles. Now he had a book contract and a growing reputation as a naturalist. As a bright and eligible bachelor, he was also getting more dinner invitations than he could accept. And he was still busy trying to make sense of what he had seen on his long voyage. Here’s one mystery Darwin spent a lot of time puzzling out: On islands of the Galápagos archipelago, six hundred miles off the west coast of Ecuador, Darwin had found dozens of species of mockingbirds—one species for each island. Why so many varieties in one neighborhood, sharp-beaked birds in one place, blunt-beaked in another? And why had other naturalists found similar variations of iguanas and tortoises and other species, each island’s populations different from the next?

  These were just the kinds of questions Darwin had been jotting in his leather-bound notebooks, along with drawings and shorthand notes to himself and summaries of conversations with other naturalists. Now he was starting to sketch out some answers, too.

  “Each species changes,” he wrote in one of his notebooks in the summer of 1838. Three words. Such a simple sentence, but a stunning one, too. Darwin had become convinced that the categories of creatures we know are not immutably fixed articulations of a divine plan, but the result of ongoing modification. By September, he had described in his notebooks the mechanism behind that change—the way an organism’s environment favors certain random mutations and extinguishes others. He called this culling process natural selection.

  This was world-changing, belief-shattering stuff. But twenty years would pass before the world would hear about it. Because Darwin, having made one of the great leaps of intellectual history, did something strange. He dropped the matter. He took no steps to publish his ideas. He sent no treatises to the scientific journals, wrote no essays for the popular press, didn’t start writing a book or even seek out a publisher. Not yet, anyway. He did tell a few friends what he was thinking, and he did write a brief summary of his new theory, which he called “a considerable step in science.” But he kept this locked away, alongside his metal-clasped notebooks. With it, he placed instructions that his work be published only after his death.

  It wasn’t like Darwin was idle during this time. He married and started a family. He moved to a house in the country. He stayed back-achingly busy at his writing: He produced volumes on coral reefs and volcanic islands, and a five-part work called The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. For a periodical called The Gardeners’ Chronicle, he wrote on some decidedly not world-changing topics: how to grow fruit trees from seedlings, for example, and the advantages of using wire rope for well buckets. And from 1846 to 1854, Darwin was almost obsessively engaged in dissecting and describing barnacles.

  Darwin devoted whole years to barnacles. He became a barnacle enthusiast. Some might say he teetered on the brink of barnacle obsession. He hunched over a custom-made barnacle microscope all day, surrounded by specimens of barnacles pickled in alcohol, trying to understand the immense variety and mystery of barnacle-dom. He referred to them as “my beloved barnacles.” One of his friends said that Darwin had “barnacles on the brain.” Darwin spent so long studying barnacles that his children grew up thinking that all fathers lived like this. On a visit to a friend’s home, one of Darwin’s young kids is supposed to have asked, “But where does your father do his barnacles?”

  The barnacles and other matters kept Darwin so busy that it wasn’t until 1859 that he finally published The Origin of Species, the immensely consequential book that articulated the theory he had first sketched out in his notebooks more than twenty years earlier. Later, when he was old and eminent, Darwin himself confessed that he was puzzled by the delay between the formulation of his ideas and their publication in book form. Some have called this interval the long wait.

  So why did Darwin wait so long to let the world know what he had figured out? Why did he put off sharing what he knew to be a monumentally significant scientific advance?

  This is a question that preoccupies biographers, historians of science, and anyone interested in the odd ways otherwise rational people—even, as in Darwin’s case, fantastically brilliant and prolific ones—behave. A lot of explanations have been offered for Darwin’s delay. To begin, there was the very momentousness of his work. Darwin knew as well as anyone that his book would have a revolutionary impact on science and suspected that it would upend the quiet life he had made for himself in the country. It would be easy to understand ambivalence about such a prospect.

  Darwin was also the product of a pious Christianity and, though he moved away from faith, he remained the husband of a believer (who worried about her husband’s eternal soul) and the loyal son of a devout father. Darwin worried about upsetting the old man. Removing the hand of God from the process of species creation, as his book clearly did, would not have been a step to be taken lightly.

  Then there was his perfectionism. Darwin, like any good scientist, was methodical and thorough—see the rows of cabinets full of barnacles to be examined. In Darwin’s orderly mind, his decades-long delay would have seemed justified as the due diligence of a scientist who wanted to be sure he got the most important work of his life right. So there was always one more experiment to run, one more resource to check. And even when he did publish, he insisted on calling his epochal book “an abstract,” as if to apologize in advance should anyone find it incomplete.

  Or is it that Darwin at first just didn’t want to be bothered with publishing? In the parlor at Down House, his home fifteen miles outside London, there was a piano, and in the long hallway, cupboards to hold tennis rackets and hiking boots and notebooks and all the equipment to make British country life livable. There was a billiards room; there were gardens. “My life goes on like cl
ockwork and I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it,” he wrote to a friend, sounding like a man completely uninterested in upending his daily routine, let alone all of intellectual history. Clockwork was right. Every day started with a walk out into the countryside before first light; every lunch was preceded by a walk around the gardens with the family dog. In between, and maybe most important, there was work, the little researches he loved. There were barnacles.

  In fact, what you see when you begin to look into Darwin’s delay is just how busy he kept himself during the time when he was not publishing The Origin of Species. Darwin could never really be still, not even in his quiet country retreat, not even when he was putting off his hugely consequential work. Idleness seems to have been hateful to him. What was needed was a project, any project. Earthworms, barnacles, orchids, whatever. He kept at these projects like the world depended on it—even though most of the world couldn’t have cared less about Darwin’s barnacles. Even Darwin later admitted that he might have overdone it a bit with the barnacles. “I doubt whether the work was worth the consumption of so much time,” he conceded in his autobiography. Darwin spent twenty years doing everything but the one thing that he must have known really was required of him—publishing his world-changing book about natural selection. In this sense, much of his biography can be read as a story of misspent energies.

  So, besides being a prolific scientist, was Darwin also a procrastinator? To answer that question, it helps to understand that procrastination has little to do with laziness.

  Not everyone gets this distinction. Bill Wilson, the man who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, once called procrastination “sloth in five syllables.” Wilson was right only about the word being a bit of a mouthful. Compounded from two Latin roots (pro, meaning “forward,” and cras, meaning “tomorrow”) it takes its time getting to the point, appropriately enough. But Wilson was wrong about the sloth. Procrastinators can keep admirably busy even while they’re avoiding their work. Darwin may have been strangely reticent about his new theory, but he can’t be called slothful. Again, for evidence, consider the barnacles. The humorist Robert Benchley came closer to the truth in his essay, “How to Get Things Done,” which articulates one of the most basic rules of procrastination: “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

  Benchley’s rule applies to all of us, not just epochally influential scientists.

  My apartment is always cleanest, my files most precisely reordered, the fridge most thoroughly cleared of moldering leftovers, when I am under the most pressing deadlines at work. When it is most crucial that I get something done, I become heroically determined to do just about anything but that thing.

  Darwin is remembered because he was brilliant and diligent and tireless. But it is his delay that makes him so accessible to us, so human. He reminds us of the knottiness of human motivations. We all have our lists of things we should do, things we must do. And yet we find some reason to not do them. In this way, we can all claim some kinship with Darwin.

  We all have our barnacles.

  * * *

  I don’t recall exactly when it occurred to me to write a book about procrastination, but I do know that for a long time after I had the idea, I did nothing about it.

  I made the mistake a lot of procrastinators make: I told friends about my idea. They encouraged me; they told me they couldn’t wait to read the book. This was the worst possible thing they could have said. They meant well, but what they didn’t understand was that their encouragement only made it less likely that I would ever get around to actually writing the book. It wasn’t that I doubted it was worth writing. Just the opposite: the more enthusiastic I got about the book, the more difficult, the more impossible, the writing became. I’m the kind of procrastinator who puts off longest that which most urgently needs to be done.

  So, when I might have been working on my book about procrastination, I was instead alphabetizing my collection of LPs, or painting a radiator, or watching YouTube videos of someone else’s dog barking at a tablespoon. I was vacuuming the stairs or shopping online for Clyde Frazier’s basketball shoes. I was sweeping the kitchen floor, unnecessarily. I was eating every last scrap of cheese in our refrigerator, or trying, without success, to repair a dripping faucet. There were even moments when—and this is my deepest, darkest shame—I listened to sports talk radio.

  When you go around telling people that you are at work on a book about procrastination, you learn just how common this kind of task avoidance is. People love to confess to procrastination. They can’t wait to tell you about their favorite ways to put off what they should be doing. Everyone procrastinates. One bird-watching procrastinator told me that he found an analog for his habit in the natural world: A bird faced with a rival, and unsure whether he should fight or flee, will often do neither. Instead, the bird will peck at the ground. For birds, too, life is a matter of finding something, anything, to do other than the thing you can’t bring yourself to do.

  In the course of preparing to write (which is to say, not write) this book, I mined deep into the literature on the topic—not so much because I am a diligent researcher but because research is everyone’s favorite way to put off actual writing. It is a version of pecking at the ground, I suppose. My research turned up the same figures again and again: 20 percent of us are chronic procrastinators; a third of all American undergraduates call themselves severe procrastinators; a hundred minutes of every workday are dithered away by workers. I also noticed that many of the researchers writing about the topic confess to the habit themselves. One of the recurring tropes of academic writing about procrastination is the self-deprecating aside about the delay in writing up research results.

  What surprised me most, though, was how many people had dedicated themselves to studying procrastination. A growing pile of journal articles examines the damage done by procrastinators to the economy, to the public health, to our collective emotional vigor. School counselors and life coaches offer solutions for the chronic postponer. Whole shelves could be filled with popular advice books about beating the habit. Maybe the great paradox of procrastination is that it has spawned such a lively mini-industry, and that it keeps so many people so very busy.

  Some of my friends got the wrong idea about my plans for this book. They thought I had in mind an advice book—a few anecdotes about high achievers, a summary of the secrets to their success, supported by the latest social scientific research. Follow this example and you, too, can be happy, fulfilled, professionally stellar.

  But I really wasn’t interested in convincing anyone to do anything or not do anything. In fact, I wasn’t even interested in putting a stop to my own procrastinating. My aim wasn’t to end my habit but to justify it, to excuse it. I hoped that if I looked through enough history and enough scholarship I would be able to find some pretext or rationale for my habitual delay. I understand that this may not be the healthiest attitude, but it’s the one that has always come most naturally to me. Self-help books leave me cold: all that business about dutiful achievement and personal advancement. If I really wanted to advance myself, I would have done so by now. But, of course, I haven’t—not yet, anyway. And if I had, I probably wouldn’t be so interested in procrastination as a topic.

  * * *

  Whenever I face a particularly difficult writing assignment, the first thing I do is go into my bathroom and scrub at the grout between the tiles. It’s not that I require a spotlessly clean bathroom, and it’s not that this mindless labor helps me think creative thoughts. It’s that as long as I am cleaning the grout, I cannot really be expected to be doing anything about the writing project that is troubling me. A person can do only so much, after all.

  This need for distraction, this hunger for self-sabotage, goes way back. The most powerful memory of my childhood is of the Sunday-night dread that followed a weekend of procrastination: homework due Monday morning and not a bit of it done. I know now that the homewor
k doesn’t end. It’s just that at some point we stop calling it homework and someone starts paying us to do it. The dread doesn’t go away, either. At least it hasn’t for me.

  Procrastination is generally considered indefensible. In history and literature, procrastinators have always been portrayed as weak, wasteful, contemptible. We are always under suspicion. Even committed procrastinators can be deeply uncomfortable with the idea of not doing something, which is probably why our foot-dragging is sometimes called killing time. This is an idiom that turns procrastinators into murderers. The language of crime and transgression comes up a lot when people talk about procrastination. The eighteenth-century poet Edward Young called it “the thief of time.” The nineteenth-century essayist Thomas De Quincey, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater pioneered the addiction memoir as a genre and established him as a pretty unassailable expert on transgression, called procrastination “that most odious of vices.” He spoke from experience. De Quincey was the sort of committed procrastinator who, when editors wrote him with offers to publish whatever he produced, would never get around to writing back, even though he was desperate for funds.

  Darwin, De Quincey: both prolific writers, both procrastinators. What is it about writing that demands deferral? I like to think that no one can understand the mind of the procrastinator quite like a writer who has risked all—career, success, the inviolable deadline—to wait until the last possible moment to begin work. When Dorothy Parker was asked why she was so late turning in a draft, she explained, “Someone else was using the pencil.” It’s true that I know other writers who are not procrastinators, who are eager to achieve certain milestones by a certain age, to be considered not just successful, but successful while still prodigiously young. My sympathies, though, are with the procrastinator, the late bloomer, the delayer. This book, then, is the product of a life spent postponing what I was supposed to be doing.