From: Rushed off my feet, shirking nine to five, Sophie Heawood can scarcely find the time to procrastinate
Sunday, 22 August 2010

And so it is with grim satisfaction that I read last week’s research, by a management consultancy firm, suggesting that junior council staff spend 68 per cent of their working time doing nothing remotely productive, and that managers are “uncomfortable confronting the poor performance of staff.”

Time-wasting accounts for two-thirds of the working day for these hapless folk who aren’t forced to spend their time more usefully, and so don’t. Of course, this is just a survey, to be taken with a pinch of salt – we have all met council staff who are overworked, underpaid, surrounded by despair and yet heroically grafting through it.

And yet, so many of us are also too familiar with that sensation of wasting our days away. You know, the creeping thought that, instead of sorting out that spreadsheet or writing those notes for the meeting, maybe you should just check out that website with videos of abandoned dogs who need adopting, or the property site for rundown farms in northern Portugal that cost less than a bedsit in Croydon. Or endlessly refreshing an ex-boyfriend’s Facebook page, to try to understand why somebody who once loved us with a blind poetic rage has now married a blonde who lists her interests as “goin out *music *drinks *stuff”.

Well, according to the consultancy, planning and management are the solution to this. Planning your time better, and planning your staff’s time better, is the only way through the temptation to slack. Is that really the answer? Or just another way of stacking yourself into the future without soaking up the present?

When John Lennon said that life was what happens when you’re making other plans, he didn’t mean that you should plan harder; he meant you should take a look around at what’s actually going on. Because endless planning is the worst procrastination of all, when life carries on apace, under your ink-smudged fingers, or your glowing screen. It isn’t something to plan through, or turn the other way through. It’s right here, right now. Do with it what you can.