I need to be more honest with myself about my relationship with procrastination.
During high school, procrastination was a coping mechanism. As an undiagnosed autistic teenager, I was spending more time processing social interactions with neurotypical people than I was on my schoolwork, often relying on the burst of energy associated with having less time to do an assignment. I used procrastination to refocus on the work that needed to be done.
While I have used procrastination throughout my adult life and professional career on basically every piece of music I’ve ever written, my life is very different now. I know I’m autistic now and have put into place a lot of boundaries that minimize some of my most destructive habits. I’m not in school and have no plans on going back to it. Going forward, I have a much better sense of how I work and a commissioning paradigm that works for me.
And yet I still rely on that rush that I get when I’ve known about a project for three or four months but now I have a week to work on it before the deadline.
This is a trap. This is not an effective coping mechanism. This is a bad habit.
Procrastination is a very big and complicated problem for me. It’s not going to be solved by one change in habits, but by a series of incremental habitual changes that break the problem into manageable chunks.
The first way I’m going to minimize procrastination in my work is by restructuring the way I establish my own deadlines. It’s not working for me, and several projects have suffered because of the way I have done it up to this point.
As a composer, I don’t like being asked to assign a deadline for myself. Because I’m a chronic procrastinator, I have developed the tendency to not only give myself not enough time to write a work but also use procrastination to further abridge the allotted time. The result is a miscalculation that puts a too much pressure on me to deliver an unrealistically excellent work product in insufficient time.
This has caused me to blow virtually every deadline I have set for myself over the last three years.
It’s also hurting me to work this way. What if something happens that’s outside my control — a family emergency, a natural disaster, a sudden life change? — and I need to step away from work. Something like that did happen in 2022, and that resulted in the most egregious and embarrassing procrastination I have ever done. During that time, I had to focus on me, and because I didn’t give myself enough time on those projects to begin with, I hurt myself and people I never meant to hurt because of a system of setting expectations and deadlines that failed.
There was no flexibility. There was no stopgap. I had no ability to take a breath and regain control.
And then there was the shame of having failed to meet a deadline. Each day that passed weighed a little more on my conscious, but that was always defeated by an instinct to procrastinate towards nothing, to fabricate that burst of energy through that pang of guilt I’d feel every time I thought of something I should have done. I was at the bottom of the procrastination whirlpool, unable to escape with a urgency lifeline dropped from above.
Urgency is a powerful drug and I have been addicted to it.
I was lucky. I had people help lift me out of that whirlpool with urgent ultimatums to finish the music or else and, with great effort, I finished my most outstanding projects. And then — I took the breath I needed. Now we are here.
I am bad at determining my own deadlines. I don’t give myself enough time. I never have.
When I have estimated how long it would take to complete a project in the past, what I have actually been estimating for people is the bare minimum amount of time it could possibly take me to complete the music. In the past, I have gone with the bare minimum as the deadline, often against collaborators asking if I needed more time and assuring me that I could take more time if I needed to. What I have to do going forward is be honest with myself, acknowledge that I need more time, and communicate with my collaborators about how I have worked in the past and why that has been unhealthy.
Whatever I think is enough time to write something? Add three months. If they provide a deadline? Make sure my bare minimum is at least three months prior to their deadline. Give myself wiggle room, more time to do what I need to do.
What doing this creates is a window in which the composition could be complete, rather than a simple deadline that increases the pressure on delivery by that date. This would relieve a lot of the pressure I have been putting on myself. The way I have used the pressure of urgency and the overwhelming rush towards an avalanche of deadlines is a form of self-harm. And, like grading myself, I have to stop. I have to stop hurting myself.
This is just the start to resolving a much bigger problem in my work life. It’s one thing to give myself the time I need, but working more consistently throughout the time I allot to projects? Bigger problem to be broken apart and resolved. But it’s a start. And that’s okay.
I never want to be at the bottom of that whirlpool ever again. I need to put things in place that guarantee that I don’t spiral like that again. I have to stop procrastinating. This is the start.