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Procrastination: why we do it and what to do about it by Jane B. Burka

Time Management : a popular ontological enquiry --- an interrogation of Burka and Yeun 's Procrastination : Why You Do It , What to Do About It

On the surface `procrastination ' is an ideologically and psychologically fixed term --- it is presumed that procrastination is definitely bad and is to be avoided . Thus there exists a whole plethora of books which seek to cure this tendency of `delaying ' And as far as such efforts go , this book is no exception , rather her book like so many others in its category systematically prescribes how to overcome

what the ancients like St Augustine called `acedia (depression leading to inordinate delays in doing anything within a time frame ) What Burka misses is that it may be fine to procrastinate on doing one 's laundry over writing a thesis to delay shaving over finishing a novel started from last night . Burka 's book suffers from giving equal importance to every work and an overt tendency to pre-plan everything . This need to plan and work towards goals is a recent phenomenon in self-help literature . Time - management books especially hinge on the setting of goals . There is a fear that by over-regimentation they kill all spontaneity and joy from life and make us automatons . But if one argues that the book is intended for clinically malefficient procrastinators then one ought to point out that self-help books are hardly written for those who need mental help . There is another point regarding this book . It is definitely a secularization of the concept of procrastination . In the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries and even later , `delaying ' was inevitably associated with the cardinal sin of sloth . This book opens up the issue for humanistic debates , albeit their humanism is rooted in the ontogeny of Freud . Burka and Yeun devote a whole chapter to the interrogation of procrastination as a formed infantile reaction to clinically significant psychological events

Fear is seen as the source for the ultimate interiorization of chronically delayed work habits . They list many different fears --- the fear of losing , the fear of being humiliated etc . Ultimately it is seen that all the various phobias are just related to the process of self-actualization and Jungian individuation . In a very interesting and significant Jennifer M . Kosmas1 gives a similar phobic-oriented account of procrastination . Whereas she and other experts in the field are highly technical and do not try to see how the tendency to delay can be prevented Burka and Yeun posit a reductive approach to problem solving and thus , delay - negation . In this they follow the beaten path , not merely of psychiatrists but of self-help gurus and time management experts like the legendary Stephen Covey . Covey in his The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People asks us all to problem-solve by breaking the problem into parts and then working towards the solution within fixed time frames . All this is traditional and time-tested but the real problem for true procrastinators in not to only know the cause of their disease but...

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