Putting off can pay off: the benefits of procrastination

And my confessions about teaching grammar

“Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.”
Oscar Wilde (or Mark Twain or Benjamin Franklin or…)  

It’s all my brother-in-law’s fault for the latest delay.

It’s always nice to blame other people for your own misfortunes.

No pressure or anything, but does anyone read the ‘About’ section on websites? When I looked at mine the other day, I cringed:

“My first book…is in the final editing stages and will hopefully be ready by the start of autumn, if not sooner.”

This was written in the summer of 2023. The final editing stages? Ho-ha!

I’m not here to crap on about more and more endless delays, but as I did mention in an earlier post, many of my delays have been for the best: important things I’d left out, sections I rewrote and improved, deleted material (either forever or to be saved for later). But I think that all these additions or subtractions have made the book better.

Or perhaps I’ve just been procrastinating.

Stefan, my German brother-in-law, was eager to have a look at my book. About a month ago, I decided to show him one particular section that I thought he’d find interesting, from an early chapter, on terminology, about ‘false friends.’

He read it and had a puzzled look on his face: “It’s not very clear,” he told me.

“False friends are words that sound very similar or almost the same in different languages but mean completely different things…to cite just one example, Gift in German means poison…”

My first thought was, “Damn it, I have to change something again? Maybe he’s wrong and it’s totally fine.”

My second thought: “Damn it, he’s right! It’s a terribly unclear paragraph.”

My third: “Damn it, how many other mistakes have I made?”

I don’t expect the book to be perfect, and as a friend and successful writer told me, I’m probably going to piss some people off from time to time and you can’t please everyone. But this was a glaring example of unclear language.

And guess what: that tiny paragraph of 41 words turned into a longer section of 958 words! Some editors would be thinking, “Bloody hell, you’re going in the wrong direction, pal.” I got carried away, but this section is good fun, and best of all, it improves the book. It spices up the end of the terminology chapter which doesn’t sound all that exciting to begin with. Now that chapter ends with a bang, and I keep chuckling to myself every time I read it (you might be able to imagine the potential laughs and awkward misunderstandings with a section on false friends, but if not…stay tuned).

That led me to go back through the book for the umpteenth time with a fine-toothed comb not only to dot the i’s and cross the t’s (sometimes literally), but also to check for anything else that needed fixing.

Dot the i's and cross the t's (idiom): to pay a great deal of attention to the details of something, especially when you are trying to complete a task; The negotiations are nearly finished, but we still have to dot the i's and cross the t's. (Cambridge dictionary)

And there were a fair few things I found.

But worst (or best?) of all? I added two entirely new paragraphs, another 2,000 or so words to the book, and believe me, it makes it all the better. 

You can thank Stefan for that.

The silver linings of procrastination

There are plenty of benefits that come from putting things off.

But first, a grammar question: what is the difference between procrastinate and put off? We’re talking about the grammatical differences, not in meaning. I’ll answer this at the end while making a confession that students probably wouldn’t be happy to hear from an English teacher.

In his excellent book on time management, Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman talks about how not responding to emails right away – or at all – can save you so much time and hassle in the long run. Never mind the idea of ‘Inbox Zero’, where you constantly try to stay on top of things by having an empty inbox. Just ignore or put off emails for a bit.

Why?

You might remember this post:

This advice might – possibly – change your life (part 2)

…where I wrote this:

“Burkeman’s advice is…don’t be in such a rush to answer all your emails and clean up your inbox. Let people wait. The faster you respond, and the more efficient you are with responding, the more people will expect of you. And that quick answer will probably lead to another email and then the chain goes on and on. More often than not, the problem will solve itself or get taken care of and it’s rarely urgent anyway. Obviously this doesn’t mean you can go and ignore any and all emails, but prioritise the important ones and many of the others will sort themselves out.”

Apologies for referencing myself, but there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, is there?

Another great hack is when you use the automatic out-of-office message while on holiday. Depending on your job, you might get back from a one or two week break to find hundreds of emails waiting for you. No one wants that. Taking another cue from Burkeman (who I think wrote this in an earlier book), and add something like this to your out-of-office reply:

“I’ll be away from the office until 30 March…any email sent during this time will be deleted upon my return. If it’s urgent (and it probably isn’t), then please contact ralph@hemightgiveashit.com or resend it to me after this date.”

And then carry out your promise when you get back: delete everything.

(Be careful though: I got into trouble once for doing this. Well, I didn’t really get into trouble, but I was told that I really shouldn’t be saying things like that, but seriously, how terribly ‘urgent’ can an email to an English teacher be?)

Another thing – why on earth do people begin out-of-office replies with a “Thank you for your email”? Thank you? You’re thanking someone for writing you an email? Is it a privilege to receive an email? Stop that immediately – for goodness’ sakes, no need to thank anyone.

Procrastination has other benefits too. This comes from behavioural economics and has been written about extensively (notably in Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, but I’ve seen this countless times). In many companies around the world, employers automatically deduct a percentage (10-15% perhaps) of your paycheck and it goes into your retirement or pension account. You can opt out of it, but that requires you to specify that you want to do so. And the majority of people keep putting it off and many never get round to it at all and just accept that this percentage will be deducted.

This is a very good thing. Many people struggle to save for the future (we can discuss the philosophy of whether you should bother saving at all another time) and this is meant to nudge people in the direction of saving. Do nothing at all, and your money will grow.

My procrastination philosophy

This works for me much of the time, but it may not necessarily for you. Take my ‘advice’ with a huge pinch of salt.

My attitude to procrastination is simple: go ahead, procrastinate if you can, and do it at the last minute.

After all, who doesn’t procrastinate? It’s human nature. Don’t feel guilty about it and use it to your advantage.

I first perfected this ‘technique’ in 2012 when I was doing my DELTA (that’s the Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults, and no, it didn’t make me a better teacher!). It’s a lot of work and is overwhelming at times (I was doing the nine-month programme, combined with my teaching timetable). My weekends were Sunday and Monday. I had to stay on top of my work regularly, and then I needed just one day to get the rest of my work done. So, all the ‘don’t procrastinate!’ people would say to do it on Sunday and get it over with so I could relax on Monday, right?

Wrong.

This is what I – and much of humanity – found: I ended up faffing about and dillydallying so much on Sunday that I got so little done and had to work on Monday as well. That meant that neither day felt like a proper day off.

So I switched up my approach and said, “to hell with Sunday,” and relaxed and even knowing that the tasks awaited me the next day, my Sundays were much more pleasurable. At least I knew I wasn’t wasting them.

On top of that, now my Saturday evenings were more guilt-free knowing I didn’t need to be so productive on a Sunday.

This works for longer-term projects as well. I can confess to this now since I’m no longer teaching, but I would regularly put off my tasks for weeks, knowing that the last-minute adrenaline rush would see me through to the finish line. Is there a bit of stress involved in this approach? Potentially, yes. If it’s an unpleasant task you’re dreading, then doing it all at the last minute is stressful and not much fun.

But psychologically, I felt better about this. You obviously have to make sure you’re not missing any deadlines (I don’t want to get you into trouble) but knowing that I didn’t need to worry about it until the end meant that I could focus on doing my regular stuff every day. Otherwise, you wake up each day and tell yourself, “I really need to get cracking on this project,” and then you beat yourself up and consider it a lost day if you don’t. Follow the “to hell with it till deadline day” approach and just accept it.

Like I said, take all of this with a massive pinch of salt, but it works for me…most of the time.

This might work for you IF you have a procrastination problem you want to kick. If not, then ignore it and do stuff right away.

Speaking of language terminology…a confession (and the answer to the grammar question posed earlier)

In my book I reveal all sorts of teaching ‘secrets’, things like how we truly feel about our students, the naughty things teachers do, what drives us crazy, etc. I share plenty of mine, one in particular: there are some areas of grammar that I don’t enjoy teaching at all. I dread teaching certain things (but because of the syllabus or the students’ needs, we have to).

That’s not such a huge secret – correct me if I’m wrong (colleagues), but all teachers have secrets like this.

So here is a bigger confession: there is some grammar that I am terrified to teach, partly because it’s so hard to make it enjoyable but deep down, I am so bad at explaining it. In fact, there are a handful of areas that for the life of me, I just cannot explain clearly. In my early days, I was a disaster teaching almost any type of grammar. I think I’ve improved, somewhat, since then. But there are still a couple of areas that make me think, “Oh no, no no no…” and “Oh, please don’t ask me any more questions about this, I can’t explain!” (former students are thinking, “Wait a minute, now I remember some bullshit explanation this bozo gave me!”)

During my first job interview, in the summer of 2005 just after my CELTA, one guy asked me to explain the subjunctive. “The sub-what?!” I hadn’t a clue. I still got the job though (it was in Moscow – I turned it down and went to Lviv instead. A good decision, I’d say).

In Lviv, I was hopeless with some grammar, and I think a lot of native speakers are in the beginning of their careers (and some for even longer). My book features a few of my early grammar teaching disasters, and I get into the ‘native v non-native speaker debate’ (I also discuss how I dislike the label of ‘native’ speaker). Just the other day I was eavesdropping on a conversation between two teachers, one of them a young American woman with one year of experience, the other a more experienced British woman. Once they got past the typical awkward small talk, I heard this from the American: “It really changes the dynamic in the classroom when you have a native speaker. You can get into the meat of the grammar.”

The British woman, to her credit, didn’t know how to respond. But she was probably thinking what I was thinking: no way. I’m not even sure what she means by ‘meat’ but that is inaccurate in so many senses, and I shall leave it there for now. The chapter in my book dealing with this topic is definitely pretty meaty though.

Just after I got to Kyiv in 2010, I had an advanced lesson. S student asked me a question and I froze, speechless. The whole class waited in anticipation. I didn’t have an answer. I can’t even remember how I dealt with it. It’s probably such a painful memory that I’ve blocked it forever.

The question was about a verb: “Is it transitive or intransitive?”

Is it what or what?!

All good teachers make mistakes and have gaps in their knowledge. We can’t be expected to know the answers to every question. But you definitely have to know the answers to whatever is related to the area you are teaching (you have to anticipate potential problems), and this was most definitely relevant to our lesson. Shame on me, but I was clueless.

In a case like that, I’m not sure if the best thing to do is to confess to not knowing, but despite what I said in an earlier post about the morality of telling lies, I would never, ever lie with a question like this. No way would I say it’s transitive unless I was sure of it. At the very least, you can turn it into a learning opportunity: “Great question, Zhenia, what do you think? Class, does anyone know?” And then you just hope that another student can bail you out.

This isn’t necessarily bad teaching. As teachers, we are trained to elicit as much as we can. Get the students to demonstrate what they know. It’s good for you to teach others. This is why teachers usually ask the class first – it’s not because we don’t know the answer, but we want to give you the opportunity to share your knowledge.

If you have the internet in your classroom (come on, of course you do), you can look into it together. You sell it as learner autonomy, giving students the tools to find out the answers themselves. It really is a valuable learning tool – you won’t always have teachers around to help you.

And when all else fails…good luck!

Now for our grammar answer: what’s the difference between procrastinate and put off?

Procrastinate is a transitive verb: it needs a direct object, showing who or what receives the action in a sentence.

Put off is intransitive: it doesn’t take a direct object.

Don’t procrastinate, it’s bad for you.
Don’t put things off until the last minute. Don’t put off your homework for too long.

Don’t procrastinate your tasks. (NO)
Putting off is a very bad habit. (NO)

From that moment on, throughout all my years of teaching, I always asked students this question, and I don’t think many – if any – knew the answer. And I asked about plenty of other verbs, especially phrasal verbs. I might have continued to ask because of the repressed trauma from the time I was first asked (it’s my therapy).

It’s also important in the difference between raise and rise, another common area of mix-up:

The government raised our taxes. (transitive)
The sun rises every morning. (intransitive)

Some phrasal verbs can be both, depending on how they are used:

My new business is really taking off. (intransitive)
I got home, took off my shoes, smelled my socks and thought, “Damn, my feet stink!” (transitive)

Look at the title of this post – that’s bad grammar, isn’t?

I clearly haven’t learnt my lesson.

As for the grammar areas that really scare the daylights out of me?

I’m not telling. Yet.

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In my next post, I will finally, at long last, reveal my cover.

In the meantime, I’ll share a fantastic cover of a book on my ‘to read’ list, one I wish I could use for my book.

As for Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, I shall be diving into that one next week on a 10-hour train journey en route to Trieste, a place I’ve long been fascinated by.