Are You *Actually* Procrastinating?

I used to think I was a procrastinator.

In college, I waited until the deadline to write papers. In the years after school, I often wait until I near the deadline to write books.

I used to think this was a huge character flaw, and I judged the shit out of myself for what I viewed as laziness.

Then I gave a presentation last week. SABR (the Society for American Baseball Research) invited me to give a speech in DC about my upcoming memoir.

They extended the invite in October.

I didn't get to work on the presentation until last week. Even after I started creating slides, I found myself struggling to finish (that's what she said).

My old instinct was to admonish myself for procrastinating.

"This would be so much easier if I had started 3 months ago."

Easier, maybe. But definitely not as good.

Here's why:

What felt like procrastination was actually marination. Although I wasn't "actively" working on my presentation for multiple months, the story I was going to tell in the speech continued churning in the back of my mind.

This is not procrastination. This is my version of creativity.

Multiple important insights didn't come to me until the day before my presentation. If I'd started it 3 months ago, I would've dug in deep on a much-less-interesting angle.

In other words: procrastination saved my presentation.

Now, there are certainly times when you procrastinate because you're avoiding the real work. We all do that. The best thing you can do in those moments is ask yourself what you're avoiding (emotionally) and face it directly before moving forward.

But if you ask yourself what you're avoiding, and the answer is truly nothing, maybe you're not procrastinating.

Maybe you're just marinating. Maybe you need to let ideas swim in your subconscious before you can manifest them in their full beauty for the world.

Our society doesn't make much space for us marinators––we tend to view that type of thinking as lazy. As such, we internalize that judgment and wear it as shame, which further constricts our slow-cooking artistry.

So I ask you:

Are you actually a procrastinator or are you a marinator?

[Photo from: http://www.burdu976.com/phs/]