Dealing With Procrastination and Guilt

I'm a Horrible Woman and I make content for other Horrible Women, and today I have a tip to offer my Dreadful and Disobedient Kin who are currently slogging their way through academia, which may help you take some of the stress out of your studies.

If you're a confirmed Horrible Woman but not a student, then you might find this advice helpful in other areas of life where you struggle with procrastination and time management. Or, if you're a student but aren't convinced that you're a Horrible Woman, then stick around and give me a chance to pique your interest in the lifestyle. We're actively recruiting.

As always, my objective is to equip you with practical and immediately actionable strategies, rather than perfect or ideal ones. The advice I offer to you today is intensely cynical and somewhat pessimistic, but if you're struggling and don't have the time or commitment to reinvent your entire flawed self, then these tips may help you accomplish what you need to with far less unnecessary suffering.

This tip is especially relevant to those Pathologically Untameable Shrews who are dealing with neurodivergence such as ADHD or who struggle with juggling tasks and managing time in general: save yourself the trouble of trying to change the way you are, and just work on accepting it.

You're a procrastinator. You're an overthinker. Maybe you're the worst person ever. You begin every semester aglow with good intentions and bucketfuls of conviction that this will be the semester that you manage your time The Right Way.

You're going to set a study timetable. You're going to start working on assignments weeks ahead of time so that you aren't rushing to do everything at the last minute. You're going to do all of the things that you think a Good Student, and a Good Person would do so that they can Achieve Things the Correct, and therefore Deserving, way.

Alas, within weeks or even days, you find yourself doing the exact same thing: watching yourself helplessly from the outside as due dates loom ever nearer and you remain bafflingly and frustratingly paralyzed; unable to act until the Window of Panic opens and prompts you to finally start the task in a last-minute flurry of activity laced with self-loathing.

If this cycle sounds familiar to you, then it's likely that you're well-acquainted with the burning shame and guilt that accompanies it, and the low-grade, constant panic of watching yourself hurtle toward disaster over and over again. The cherry on top of this concoction of self-loathing and stress is the frustration and disappointment of finding yourself in the exact same position over and over again, seemingly unable to change.

To be clear, this is NOT an ideal way of operating. There are objective risks involved in doing things in a last-minute race to the finish line, even for those who've accepted this as their process and made it work for them. Things can go wrong at the last minute, either causing that last step to become much bigger than anticipated, or preventing you from completing it altogether.

It can be bad for our health to operate this way too, particularly if you're dealing with illness or disability. 12-hour marathons at your keyboard aren't good for anyone, and I often collapse mentally and physically at the end of each semester, cut down by sleep deprivation as a result of too many long nights racing against deadlines. This is far from ideal, and I wouldn't encourage anyone to adopt this approach on purpose.

With that said, some of us struggle to change and need to take some kind of practical harm-minimization approach while we work on our strategies long-term, and some of us are going to be doing things this way for the rest of our lives. It might be an unnecessarily painful approach, but it may not have to be quite as painful as it often is. This is why I'm suggesting you consider targeting the stress and shame associated with the process rather than the process itself.

The stress of watching myself do what comes naturally to me, along with the guilt and shame over it, are a large part of what makes the process so painful and taxing on me. At some point in the last couple of years I decided to stop struggling against it and just accept this is how I operate, because realistically, I wasn't facing a choice between doing things The Right Way or My Way; The choice available to me was whether to do it My Way while punishing myself for it, or do it My Way without punishing myself for it.

I could either spend weeks not putting anything down on paper until the last minute while hating myself and agonizing over it, or I could spend weeks getting on with my life until the moment when I would become able to formalise the work that had been percolating in my mind the whole time. I was never more likely to do things differently even while stressing and kicking myself the whole time, so what purpose did that serve other than to make the whole experience far worse?

Your process is what it is, and the layer of guilt, shame, and panic that sits atop it is only making that process unnecessarily painful without changing anything about it. If you're anything like me, this idea that there's a Right Way and a Wrong Way to accomplish something also strips you of your ability to enjoy success. I've gotten top marks back on essays that I wrote on the same evening they were due and found myself consumed by guilt because I felt like I hadn't accomplished it the Morally Virtuous way.

It might seem easy to advocate for letting go of the stress and self-criticism if you're performing well despite your chaotic process, and I do so I'd understand people who don't being tempted to scoff at what I'm saying. But if you're not performing well and feel like you have less right to stop self-flagellating because of it, please know that succeeding under those circumstances isn't likely to feel like success. At best it feels like survival. What I'm saying here is for everyone who struggles with this, whether you're making it work somehow or not.

I don't think any of us are actually helped by being our own tormentors. However you get the job done is the right way to get the job done. If you have something due in two weeks and you're in the grip of panic and guilt over the fact that you haven't started it yet, try giving yourself permission to just do it when you do it, because spending the next two weeks beating yourself up isn't likely to change the outcome; It's just going to ensure that by the time you're racing against the clock to write a whole essay in a single evening, you're doing it in a state of emotional exhaustion.

If you're a Horrible Woman, or someone who hasn't yet accepted it but finds yourself feeling an odd sense of kinship with those of us who have, consider becoming a Patron and supporting the Diabolical and Unwomanly work we do here.