Most of the time, procrastination is a bad thing. But I’d like to suggest that it’s not always a bad thing, and that sometimes it might actually be a good thing.
It all depends on how you procrastinate.
If you adopt the “YouTube rabbit hole” method, you’re doing it wrong. You’ll end up eating Wheat Thins at 3:48am, wondering how you became so interested in cat videos.
But if you procrastinate by doing something that is extremely different from your normal routine, completely unrelated to the task you’re trying to avoid, the results might surprise you. If you go to the library and grab a book at random, or go see a movie that you are absolutely sure you will hate, or eat at that place around the corner that you always pass but never enter…one simple decision to do something out of your ordinary might lead to something good.
The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen is a good example of this. After a few years of reasonable but not earth-shattering success, he decided to do something different. He broke out of his normal routine. By moving to Italy.
During his self-imposed exile from his homeland, he wrote the two plays that would launch him to worldwide fame; Brand and Peer Gynt. So while I’m not trying to imply that Ibsen was a procrastinator, he certainly knew how use a change in routine to spark his creativity. So perhaps he was an effective procrastinator.
Appropriately, the play Peer Gynt features a main character legendary for his procrastination. It also features a legendary soundtrack by Ibsen’s countryman Edvard Grieg. The soundtrack is filled with songs that even non-classical fans are familiar with (like this one and this one), but my favourite is “The Death Of Ase”.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The slow, climbing chords that open the piece.
2. The same pattern one minute later, but a fifth higher.
3. The same pattern in reverse, creeping downwards chromatically about three minutes in. I don’t know if Grieg meant these sequences to represent Ase’s last breath, or an ascent to heaven, but they’re chill-inducers.
Recommended listening activity:
Something else.