Happy Wednesday! This week we’re delighted to welcome Andrew Santella, the author of Soon: An Overdue History of Procrastination, from Leonardo and Darwin to You and Me, which is out now from Dey Street / HarperCollins. He talks to us about procrastination, freelance writing, and coaching a softball team.
You can listen to the podcast using the embedded player below, or download the file directly to take with you on the go!
You can find Andrew Santella on Twitter or at his website, and the book is available wherever you get your books.
Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).
Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcript is coming soon and will be available under the jump!
TRANSCRIPT
THEME SONG: You don’t judge a book by its cover. Page one’s not a much better view. And shortly you’re gonna discover the middle won’t mollify you. So whether whiskey’s your go-to or you’re like my gin-drinking friend, no matter what you are imbibing, you’ll be better off in the end reading the end.
GIN JENNY: Welcome to the Reading the End bookcast with the demographically similar Jennys. I’m Gin Jenny.
WHISKEY JENNY: And I’m Whiskey Jenny.
GIN JENNY: And we are back to talk to you about books and literary happenings. On today’s episode, we are delighted to welcome Andrew Santella, author of the new book Soon, An Overdue History of Procrastination from Leonardo and Darwin to You and Me. Andrew, welcome to the podcast.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Well, thank you. It’s my pleasure to be here.
GIN JENNY: We’re delighted to have you. We have lots and lots of questions about the book and procrastination. But before we get into all that, we always ask our guests— what are you reading?
ANDREW SANTELLA: I just finished a novel that knocked me out by Jennifer Egan called Manhattan Beach. Really powerful, but also just, I couldn’t stop turning the pages, which is a good quality in a novel.
GIN JENNY: Oh, yeah.
ANDREW SANTELLA: And some really good sex scenes, too.
GIN JENNY: Are you already a fan of Jennifer Egan, or was this your first book of hers?
ANDREW SANTELLA: No, I read A Visit from the Goon Squad. It was my only other— well, I shouldn’t admit that in case Jenny’s listening. Can I drop a name here? I’ll just start this— you don’t know me that well, so this is embarrassing to do. But I actually know Jennifer Egan.
So in the summer I coach a high school baseball team.
GIN JENNY: Oh, that’s right. I forgot about this.
ANDREW SANTELLA: So Jenny Egan’s son is my first baseman.
GIN JENNY: And be honest. How is he as a first baseman?
ANDREW SANTELLA: He’s a great kid.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Well, you’d better hope she’s not listening.
[LAUGHTER]ANDREW SANTELLA: No, he’s an outstanding defensive first baseman. And he’s an outstanding— I think he plays trumpet. So many of my kids are multi-talented, and honestly, it blows my mind. They’re athletes, and they’re musicians, and they’re interested in— you know, they read the New York Times. And they’re interested in current events. I spent most of my teenage years just drooling.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, same.
ANDREW SANTELLA: I am really endlessly impressed by them. So, anyway back to Jennifer Egan. She, to me, is— I’ll be the 3 millionth person to say what a gifted writer of fiction she is, but she’s also a really incredible baseball mom.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Huh.
ANDREW SANTELLA: We have these team meetings where I’m up there talking about how important it is for everyone to be on time, and blah blah blah. And she’s there taking notes as if she weren’t, like, skipping a PEN meeting or something, you know, where Salman Rushdie was in attendance. Like she didn’t have something much, much better to do.
GIN JENNY: Does she share the minutes that she’s taken with y’all afterwards?
ANDREW SANTELLA: No, she’s just taking notes for her own— she wants to be sure that she gets all her duties right. And then she’s such a model of someone who manages to be a great artist, but also just a really solid person, and a great friend and a good neighbor. I mean I’m just endlessly impressed by her.
GIN JENNY: Cool. We read Visit from the Goon Squad a while ago, right, Whiskey Jenny, for podcast?
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. I think it was one of our early ones.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, and I liked it a lot.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, same. And I did read Manhattan Beach and really enjoyed— it felt very, like, an old school novel. It was just very—especially in comparison with Visit from the Goon Squad. It was just sort of classic structure and things like that. And that aspect of it was very comforting.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Right. And that it was a historical novel changed the way you read it, too. I mean, at least for me, anyway, I think when I read a historical novel like that, I’m reading it the way I might read a history. I’m looking for clues about the time and about how life was different then. Which, I’m not sure that’s the job of a novelist to tell us that, but a good historical novel does that. Elizabeth Gilbert had one out last year— it was probably three years ago now.
GIN JENNY: I just read that.
ANDREW SANTELLA: What did you think of that?
GIN JENNY: I liked it. It was maybe a little slow moving for me. It was clear her research had been extensive. I don’t tend to be a fan— this is a personal thing. I don’t tend to be a fan of books that cover the whole of a person’s life span. I want to get to the fireworks factory. I really like a fast moving plot.
Well, Whiskey Jenny, what are you reading?
WHISKEY JENNY: I am— let’s see, what am I reading? I just started Geekerella by Ashley Poston, which is a YA retelling of Cinderella, where it’s modern day and the dude is an actor who gets cast as a prince in sort of a Star Trek parallel universe TV show.
GIN JENNY: That sounds perfect.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yes. So it’s going great so far. Right now our Cinderella and our prince are texting, but they don’t know who each other are, so it’s a lot of fun to be like, you two! Come on, just figure it out already!
[LAUGHTER]ANDREW SANTELLA: Do you feel like maybe that’s the peak of their relationship? I don’t know, I’ve been married for so long, and so very happily married for so long— I said that because I know you know Mrs. Santella.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: We do. We love her.
ANDREW SANTELLA: But I just feel like, you ever have that experience when you’re texting someone, and it’s like, wow, it’s great and it’s flirty and it’s fun. We have this great rapport. But when you actually meet them in person they’re eugh. And I’m not even talking about the physical appearance. It’s just there’s something about the virtual interaction that—
GIN JENNY: Yeah. You have more room to construct yourself, I guess, over email or over text.
ANDREW SANTELLA: And maybe construct yourself in a way that’s not so honest, maybe, or doesn’t give as honest a picture of you. I think we don’t completely accurately perceive each other when we’re interacting by text, or by Skype for that matter.
WHISKEY JENNY: No, you get to present sort of your ideal self.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Well, in this case you’re probably thinking I’m much more boring than I really am.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: So this is hilarious, because one of the books— I’m reading two books right now. One of them is an A-plus romance novel called A Princess in Theory by Alyssa Cole. And it’s about a prince of a fictional country based on Lesotho, which is a country in Africa that I really love. It has a really interesting history. And he comes to America and under a false identity meets this girl. And they fall in love but he has secrets and da da da. So in fact when they interact virtually, when he is being the prince, things don’t go well for them. But when they meet in person and he has his secret identity on, everything goes awesome.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Huh.
GIN JENNY: So who knows?
ANDREW SANTELLA: Wasn’t there— like a month ago there was a story in The New Yorker that created a big wave. “Cat Person?”
GIN JENNY: Oh yeah. I read that.
ANDREW SANTELLA: I think that story also dealt with that idea of the various identities we present to each other, and how we could jump to conclusions about who a person is based on one identity and then we have to deal with that other identity.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. It’s interesting.
ANDREW SANTELLA: I want to know how you— I don’t have a favorite African country. How does Lesotho become one’s favorite African country?
GIN JENNY: Well, it’s not my favorite. My favorite actually is Namibia.
ANDREW SANTELLA: You’ve ranked them all?
GIN JENNY: No, I haven’t. But I am doing a reading project. It’s a long, long term reading project where I’m trying to read one good history of every country in Africa.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Wow.
GIN JENNY: I’m only doing like five a year, so it’s a slow moving project. But I have read a book about Lesotho, and it was really fascinating. It was by a writer called Elizabeth Eldredge, and it was just a really, really interesting look at the way they navigated the different colonial powers around them, and set them against each other in order to preserve their own country’s integrity and independence. And it was just really cool. It really got me in on Lesotho.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Could you tell me the map coordinates for Lesotho?
GIN JENNY: Yeah, so there’s two teeny little countries inside of South Africa, and Lesotho is one of them.
ANDREW SANTELLA: OK. You didn’t really answer my question, but I’ll accept that.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: OK, thank you. I appreciate that.
GIN JENNY: All right, we have one more question that we always ask our podcast guests. Are you ready for it?
ANDREW SANTELLA: OK.
GIN JENNY: Sea or space?
ANDREW SANTELLA: Those are my only choices.
GIN JENNY: Those are the only choices. You have to choose between sea and space. There’s no other options.
ANDREW SANTELLA: I can’t say, like, bed?
WHISKEY JENNY: No.
ANDREW SANTELLA: I’d probably say sea, just because it’s closer to Earth, and I like Earth.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: That’s the majority view, right, Whiskey Jenny?
ANDREW SANTELLA: Really?
WHISKEY JENNY: We both say sea, and I think most guests say sea, as well. Yeah, people love the ocean.
GIN JENNY: People do love the ocean. It’s so unknowable.
ANDREW SANTELLA: The ocean’s unknowable?
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Huh.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, there’s so much of it we don’t know that much about.
ANDREW SANTELLA: I don’t mean to argue, and certainly I can see myself digging myself into a deeper and deeper hole and antagonizing the people who are soon going to be asking me questions. I don’t mean to do that, but here I go anyway. We certainly know much less about space, relatively speaking, than we do about the ocean.
WHISKEY JENNY: That’s true.
GIN JENNY: In proportion.
WHISKEY JENNY: Right. But there’s still some parts of the ocean that we know zero about, which I think is more interesting because it’s right there.
GIN JENNY: You know, space is infinite, so of course we don’t know a lot of stuff about space. But the sea’s right here with us.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Yeah. There’s no sharks in space.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, that’s been raised. It’s a fair point.
ANDREW SANTELLA: OK.
GIN JENNY: All right, well, let’s get to it. Will you tell us a little bit about yourself and the book, and what inspired you to write it?
ANDREW SANTELLA: I’ll try.
GIN JENNY: OK.
ANDREW SANTELLA: So I am an independent writer, a freelance writer, which is to say I’m a procrastinator. And I have deadlines that— I make all my deadlines. I’m really diligent about meeting my deadlines. But I make things very difficult on myself by waiting way too long to begin work on things.
As an independent writer, I owe some of the editors I work with regularly ideas. They expect me to send them ideas every so often. And I owed one of my editors some ideas for some magazine essays, and I didn’t have any. Or at least I hadn’t sent him any in a while. And I was due to send him some, and I didn’t really have any ideas. And I kind of came up with this shallow, sort of gimmicky— well, I’ve been putting this off for so long that I don’t have any ideas, maybe I should pitch him an essay about putting things off and procrastinating. Ha ha ha.
And I almost dismissed the idea as being just gimmicky and shallow. But as I thought about it a little bit, I started to see that when you think about procrastination, you necessarily think about the priorities you’re setting for yourself. And you think about all sorts of pretty profound questions about your life, and about what matters to you, and what your obligations are, and questions of individual autonomy versus your obligations to your family, individual autonomy versus your obligations to the marketplace. Once you start thinking about procrastination, it raises a lot of really meaty questions. And so when I started down that gimmicky path, I found out that the path actually ended up being kind of rich for a writer, essayist, and I decided to pursue it.
The only thing that was great about it was I found that I could spend a lot of time researching the history of procrastination, which meant that I didn’t have to actually sit down to the book for a while, because I could really waste a lot of time on research. So that’s how I got onto the project.
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, since you mentioned research, did you have any research tips, or information that you discovered during the course of your research that you weren’t able to include in the book that you found really interesting? Were there any, like, DVD extras?
[LAUGHTER]ANDREW SANTELLA: Well, you’ll have to wait for the director’s cut. [LAUGHTER] I was stunned and amazed at how many academics had made procrastination their topic. One of the ironies of procrastination is that it really keeps a lot of people busy in academia. I mean, psychologists research it, and behavioral economists write about it, and philosophers write about it. And increasingly biologists and neuroscientists wrestle with it. It’s one of those topics that you can approach from a variety of angles and disciplines. I had no idea that any of that was the case.
I went and talked to a few of those people, as many as would talk to me. And I found out that procrastination, there’s all the internecine rivalries in the world of procrastination research that there are in any other academic field.
GIN JENNY: Say more about that. I’m fascinated. I love rivalries.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Well, so some procrastination researchers might think about procrastination as a problem of time management, whereas others would say that the problem is one of mood regulation. So it’s not just a matter of inability to manage one’s time. It’s more an inability to— so what they mean by mood regulation is correcting the idea that, well, before I can start on this project I need to be in the right frame of mind. So I’ll wait until I’m in the right frame of mind. Or, if I just have another cup of coffee then I’ll have the energy to approach this. If I could just clean up my room and get everything in order first. You’re trying to create this ideal situation and an ideal mood within yourself before you can approach the project.
Those are two competing ways of thinking about the problem. One would suggest that the problem is within ourselves, an inability to regulate ourselves and our own emotions, our own moods. The other being an inability to manage our external obligations. That would be the time management, if that makes any sense.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, that does make sense, that they go in those two buckets. Well, you talk in the book about how every theory of procrastination that you encountered kind of made sense to you. So now that you’ve read all the theories, you’ve written this book, if someone asked you now, why do you procrastinate, what would your answer be?
ANDREW SANTELLA: If I had to explain why I procrastinate personally, I think for me it’s sort of a stance that I like to adopt relative to the world. That is, it’s sort of my way of keeping the world at arm’s length, which is, I think, a convenient position for me as a writer to be in. I like to be at a remove from things. And so when I procrastinate, it’s my way of positioning myself and I suppose deluding myself.
No, really, I think there’s a huge element of self-deception and delusion involved in procrastinating. And the people who want to fix procrastination really don’t like that. They would say that people should not deceive themselves. They should not delude themselves. I get that. But I guess I would say that sometimes a little bit of delusion and self-deception helps us navigate the world and helps us get through the day. And so for me, procrastination is a way of sort of keeping the world at arm’s length and maintaining my writer’s pose, or stance, or whatever.
It’s also— I think I was being very forgiving of myself in that last formulation. So I’ll also say, a lot of times when I’m afraid of a project— normally the first thing you do when you’re afraid of a project is put it off.
GIN JENNY: Oh god, yeah.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Yeah, and not just afraid of failing at a project, but afraid of succeeding at a project. Procrastination is a great way to sabotage yourself. I do all those things.
GIN JENNY: I think— well, let me ask you this. Do you feel that you’ve successfully deluded yourself when you’re procrastinating? Like, do you think that whatever you’re doing to put off the project is successful and worth it? Or do you know deep down that you should actually just be working on the thing?
ANDREW SANTELLA: I think I’m always aware that I’m trying to deceive myself, always aware that I’m being a little bit of a BSer. [LAUGHTER] Sometimes I don’t care.
I’ve also come to recognize that sometimes the things that— I guess it’s a matter of what you think you should be doing.
GIN JENNY: Sure.
ANDREW SANTELLA: I guess when I procrastinate, sometimes I’m saying, well, I don’t really want to do what the world wants me to do. They don’t matter to me. I guess sometimes I’m aware of that self-deception.
GIN JENNY: So it sounds like you’re more in the bucket of theories that would say that the locus of procrastination is within oneself, and it’s not about external things.
ANDREW SANTELLA: I do think that that makes more sense to me. I wouldn’t dismiss time management altogether.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Sure.
ANDREW SANTELLA: I did learn a lot about time management researching in the book. I mean, not a lot. You need only look at my desk to see how little I learned. But I did learn something about time management in the course of researching the book. But I would agree that I find, as you say, the locus of procrastination within oneself.
GIN JENNY: Did you find any of the theories really didn’t make sense to you at all? Or did you really find a piece of truth in all of them?
ANDREW SANTELLA: I think just about everything a researcher had to say made some sense to me. I will say that— and I guess this goes back to what interested me in the topic to begin with. More broadly, the idea that procrastination has to be fixed is questionable to me. One of the first things I picked up on when I committed to writing about this, first as a magazine piece and then as a book— I would tell people who would ask me what I’m working on, and I’d say, oh, I’m writing about procrastination. Oh, you should tell me what you’ve learned, because boy, that’s a huge problem for me. I need to fix it. It was almost that the assumption was— you know, we’re all procrastinators, which yes, there’s something to that. But the assumption was that the only thing of interest to say about procrastination was how to fix it.
And I get that. Some people have their lives really plagued by procrastination and they want to make their lives better. I’m not trying to dismiss that. But I don’t think it’s just a disorder to be fixed. I don’t think it’s just an illness to be cured. I think it’s sort of an interesting human problem, and one that if we think about it long enough and attend to our procrastination, and try to consider why we’re doing it, we could end up learning a lot about oneself. So I guess generally psychology’s approach to procrastination is to fix it. Psychology comes out of medicine, and the things they want to address, they think of as disorders, or as—
GIN JENNY: Problems.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Somehow, yeah. So they want to fix it. And I think there’s some procrastinators and some procrastinations do need to be fixed. But I don’t think that’s the only approach to be taken. And so I’m not sure I am totally comfortable with psychology’s approach to the topic.
WHISKEY JENNY: OK. You mentioned that people’s response when they heard you were writing this book was, I do that too, how can you help me? Was there any other response that kept cropping up from people you were talking to about the project? I assume you also got a lot of jokes—
GIN JENNY: We were imagining a lot of jokes.
WHISKEY JENNY: —about manuscript due dates.
ANDREW SANTELLA: We did get a lot of jokes. Oh, I will read that eventually.
GIN JENNY: Ha ha ha!
ANDREW SANTELLA: And people who have made this their lives, and I’ve talked to researchers who have been working on procrastination literally for decades, and they are very tired of jokes. To the point where one researcher told me that he just doesn’t tell people what he works on. When he’s on a cross country airplane flight and someone wants to know what he does for a living, he sort of fudges a little bit, because he doesn’t want to hear the jokes. And I can’t quite blame him. Having said that, it doesn’t stop me from making my own really tired jokes.
But the other thing I heard a lot was, oh, I am the world’s greatest procrastinator. Apparently the competition for that top spot is fierce, because everyone is claiming to be the world’s worst procrastinator. And we can’t all be, number one, but everyone thinks that they’re uniquely dithering.
GIN JENNY: You kind of talk about that in the book, how some people almost wear it as a badge of pride, which I thought was interesting.
ANDREW SANTELLA: You could take a sort of perverse pride in it. And it is sort of not an attractive pose to take. Because when you think about it, for me to take pride in my procrastination and make jokes about my procrastination suggests that I have the luxury to procrastinate. And maybe some people now and throughout history didn’t have that luxury. And so I shouldn’t maybe be such a smug SOB about it, but there you have it.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Well, you do talk about a lot of people in history who had, I guess the space to do some procrastination. You talk about Darwin and all the years he spends on barnacles— which, Whiskey Jenny and I were both so charmed by all the barnacle talk. Do you have a favorite among the historical procrastinators that you researched? Did one of them really resonate with you?
ANDREW SANTELLA: I really fell in love with Darwin. I mean, apart from his barnacles.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: We loved the barnacles.
WHISKEY JENNY: Just really, the Darwin family seemed delightful in general, when they were playing bassoon to the earthworms.
ANDREW SANTELLA: They really do seem like— he seems to have been a really dedicated father, especially for that time. And the relationship between him and his wife really seems to be a really tender one, uniquely so for the time. And he just seems like a really bitchin’ cool dude.
But I also liked that he— I don’t know that he was a procrastinator. I guess that’s part of what the book’s about is trying to figure that out, and I’m not sure i ever did come up with an answer. But certainly I did sense that he was little ambivalent about what he was doing. Or at least he was ambivalent about how to proceed. And I found that enormously reassuring.
And in some weird way, if I could aspire to feeling a connection with someone so brilliant, I did feel that— in my own decidedly unbrilliant way— I think I know a little bit of what he felt. Or I think we’ve might have been feeling some of the same things, although I wasn’t really coming up with Earth shaking theories that would change the way we think about natural science. But sometimes when I was late on a story for GQ about cardigan sweaters, I think maybe I was reacting the same way Darwin did.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: It is very similar.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Yeah, I think so.
GIN JENNY: Actually, you know what I found really interesting? I did like the Darwins the best, personally, but I thought it was really interesting— I didn’t really know that Leonardo da Vinci just never finished stuff, ever.
ANDREW SANTELLA: He was one of several people I ran across in the course of working on the book who just seemed to have such active minds in and sort of polymathic approaches to the world, that they bounced around and couldn’t stick to one thing. And I know some people, some of Leonardo’s contemporaries were enormously frustrated by that. He was a sought-after portrait painter, but he was so much more than that. But all the people who had hired him to paint portraits cared about was, where was their portrait? [LAUGHTER] It didn’t matter to them that he had taken some time off to make some really cool drawings of this brain that he’d dissected or something. I mean, they just wanted their portrait. So I think it was interesting that he just couldn’t, or didn’t feel the need to reconcile his vast intellect and creative genius to the exigencies of the marketplace. He wanted to just go in a million directions at once, even if he ended up being a little tardy on the portraits.
GIN JENNY: Did you find any commonalities among the different procrastinators that you were researching? You mentioned that a lot of them were polymaths. Was that typical for the people you discovered, or were they all over the place?
ANDREW SANTELLA: Well, it was, but I think because I very self-servingly focused on great procrastinators. That is, procrastinators who nevertheless managed to be great. So in other words, I guess I didn’t really delve into too many people who ended up being completely unremarkable.
GIN JENNY: I mean, how would you find them?
ANDREW SANTELLA: Well, I don’t know. Maybe I would have looked in debtors prison or something. I don’t know.
But as a procrastinator, what I want to know about, and I think what a lot of us want to know about, is the people who dithered and delayed and wasted their time on unnecessary tasks, but still managed to be great achievers. Like Leonardo, like Darwin. Because, you know, they justify our habit. Hey, that worked for them. Maybe it’ll work for me. I mean, I think we all deep down know that that’s delusional. [LAUGHTER] But you know, it’s a comforting delusion, which I’m all for.
WHISKEY JENNY: Do you have any— maybe not brain studies, but do you have any outputs that came out of procrastination that you’re especially proud of, or that you are especially grateful that they exist?
GIN JENNY: It doesn’t have to be something that changes the face of science.
WHISKEY JENNY: It does not.
ANDREW SANTELLA: That’s good, because I don’t have a lot of those. Yeah, well no, I’d have to think if I could identify them. But generally I can say that I think some of the best things I’ve done are things I’ve done to just avoid doing the things I should have been doing. I mentioned teaching and coaching. For me, part of the attraction of that is that it gives me an excuse not to do the writing I might be doing.
But I also think the teaching I do and the coaching I do makes a difference in people’s lives, and I’m proud of it So I think it’s possible that some things could be both a diversion and a distraction and a procrastination, but also could be worthwhile. I think some of the stories I write and essays I produce I do only to keep myself from having to do something else that I don’t want to do. I think we all had that experience. And I think sometimes the things that we do to keep us from doing other things that we don’t want to do end up being the best things that we do. Boy, did that make any sense at all?
GIN JENNY: Yeah, definitely. Actually, I was curious as I was reading this if, as you were researching this and thinking more about procrastination in general terms and specific terms to you, did your relationship to procrastination change? Like, did you start to feel differently about it within yourself? Like, is this a new revelation that you’ve had because of the book?
ANDREW SANTELLA: The biggest revelation I had was I don’t know— I went into the book thinking that I, too, had a claim to the world’s top procrastinator spot and learned that I might not be that big of a procrastinator. I certainly can do it at times, and do do it at times, and will continue to. But I’ve been trucking along at my chosen work for a few decades now and doing OK, and people haven’t told me to stop doing it. So I’m getting my work done, and my family’s intact, and I’m not desperately in over my head financially. So I’m doing something right, and yet I still feel like I’m a shameful procrastinator.
Well, I think I’ve just described most of us. We’ve been so shamed into thinking that we’re not meeting some model of efficiency that we think we’re awful procrastinators, but I think most of us are doing OK, even if we do procrastinate sometimes.
GIN JENNY: Which is interesting, because I think the mindset under, you know, late stage capitalism, is very much that people’s worth is tied up with the things they produce. But even with that, we’re never allowed to be satisfied with what we’re producing, even if, like you say, it’s actually working.
ANDREW SANTELLA: That’s exactly right. I mean, part of what drives capitalism is that you’re always trying to maximize profits, be more efficient, and do more with less. And you know, that’s reflected in the self-help titles, like, you know, Faster— whatever it is. Faster, Stronger, More Macho, or whatever. Louis Menand from The New Yorker has written about this— I don’t want to claim this as my idea. But he writes about how we as a self-help culture adopt management ideas and make them sort of our personal credos. That is, the management theories of the day end up trickling down into our personal self-help agenda, so that we’re always feeling like we have to be more efficient and more productive. And we’re always going through these yearly annual employer reviews with ourselves that we’re failing, because we’re just not up to our internal human resource departments’ idea of what we should be getting done.
GIN JENNY: Oh man, that is such a great way to describe that phenomenon. I’m going to steal that. I’m going to say that to other people.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, I loved reading about it as a subversion of the system. And I also really enjoyed the framing of it as a form of optimism, where tomorrow is always better, and tomorrow is always full of promise. I thought that was a really lovely, hopeful message.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Right, I think so too. And then I don’t know— I do know that a lot of procrastination is tied up with depression. And you know, we’ve been laughing about the phenomenon a lot, and for some people it might not be such a laughing matter. I recognize that. But you know, some people just can’t get things done or can’t start on things because they’re just too sad. They’re just too depressed. And that’s a serious thing.
But I do think there’s an element for others, and maybe for the depressed people too at times, of optimism in procrastination. Like you said, there’s always a better time. There’s always tomorrow. In my own life, I feel like I wake up every day ready to just do amazing things. But by 3:00 in the afternoon, I just have totally given up on the world and myself and life in general. And the only thing that saves me during that mid-afternoon trough of despond is just the idea that, you know, tomorrow is going to be a little bit better. It’ll be fine. I’ll get it done tomorrow. That’s another one of those comforting delusions, and boy, I don’t know how I’d would get through life without that particular delusion.
GIN JENNY: It’s really interesting that you bring up depression, because I have depression. That’s the thing for me. And one of my big rules for managing it is that I never, ever assume that the future version of myself is going to be having an easier time than current me. And I try to structure my life like that, to make future Jenny’s life a little easier. So I’m less inclined to procrastinate. I really want to knock the stuff out now so that in case things go awry tomorrow or the next day, I’ll be prepared. I’ll have my ducks in a row.
ANDREW SANTELLA: That’s a really interesting way to think about it. And it’s a way that it comes from some of the behavioral sciences, talking about the various selves— present self and future self. I guess the term of art is temporal discounting. The idea that— well, I’m not sure this exactly describes temporal discounting, but there’s this idea that the things we put off now, we’ll have to pay for in the future. And as you say, you’re making things difficult for future Jenny. So you could make small sacrifices now, or make an enormous sacrifice later, is sort of one economic way to think about it.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I think that is kind of how I think about it.
Well, you had talked earlier about originally envisioning this as a magazine article. It must have changed enormously from your early conception of it. What changed as you began doing the research and began working on the project?
ANDREW SANTELLA: Well, I did actually write a piece for Notre Dame Magazine, which is a really wonderful university magazine. And that came out a few years ago. It was a relatively short essay that touched on some of the things I developed in the book. I just felt like I had more to say and more to find out. One thing that I did with the book that I didn’t do with the magazine essay was I went out on the road and went to some of the world procrastination sites out there. Partly because I was just interested to see some of these places and find out more about the phenomenon, but as you can probably guess, also as a way of wasting time and putting off writing the book.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Were there any research trips you had in mind that you wanted to make but weren’t able to?
ANDREW SANTELLA: I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t go to Reunion Island. I’m not even sure I’m pronouncing it correctly. But there is a small island— they are one of the places that has made a cult of St. Expedite, who I have learned is revered by some as a patron of procrastinators and other lost causes.
WHISKEY JENNY: Is that the island where they decapitate the statue of the saint if their wish is not granted?
ANDREW SANTELLA: That’s exactly right.
GIN JENNY: That’s so violent!
ANDREW SANTELLA: Well they put up these roadside shrines to the saint, and pray to it and make various devotions and oblations to the saint. And like you said, if they don’t, what I understand— having never been there I can’t verify this; I wasn’t about to go to the Indian Ocean to find this out— but I’m told that the tradition there is that if the saint doesn’t come through for you, you lop the head off the little figurine there and leave it at the roadside. And there are, as I understand it, a lot of headless Expedite statues around Reunion Island.
I did, however, go see— I visited St. Expedite, or a statue or shrine of his, in New Orleans.
GIN JENNY: Woo!
ANDREW SANTELLA: But yeah, New Orleans and Louisiana in general are another locus of Expedite devotion. It was an interesting phenomenon for me to go see, and also gave me an excuse to go to New Orleans right before Mardi Gras.
GIN JENNY: Oh, man. That’s a lot.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Which is my idea of research.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Well, can I ask what’s next for you? Do you have another book in the idea stage?
ANDREW SANTELLA: I do. I have a number of ideas percolating. I’m not sure I’m ready to share any of them. One has to do with not sleeping. And the other is about bad science in early America. You know, people who thought that the Earth was hollow and that sort of stuff, and who thought that mastodons might be roaming the trans-Mississippi west in the early 1800s.
GIN JENNY: Oh, that sounds fascinating.
ANDREW SANTELLA: I want to look into that, and I have started to look into that. You know, I think mastodons are awfully cute. [LAUGHTER] Anything I can do to think more about them and work with them more, I’m all for that.
GIN JENNY: Sure. Well Andrew, thank you so much for coming on. It has been great talking to you. We really enjoyed the book. Do you want to tell the internet where they can find you?
ANDREW SANTELLA: Yes. The internet. Boy, I should probably know this. Well, I’m on Twitter, internet, somewhere. I should have a handle. I don’t know what it is. I’d have to search.
GIN JENNY: That’s OK, I’ll link it in the show notes.
ANDREW SANTELLA: There you go. And I’m on some other things but I don’t know what they are. I can’t wait to hear from you all, though!
GIN JENNY: I’ll put it all on the show notes. Well, the book is Soon, an Overdue History of Procrastination from Leonardo and Darwin to You and Me, and it is available in bookstores everywhere. Andrew, thank you so much again for coming on.
ANDREW SANTELLA: Thanks so much for your interest, and I really enjoyed talking with both of you.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, likewise.
WHISKEY JENNY: Thank you so much. This was a real delight. Well, next time we are reading The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater, Essays on Crafting, by Alanna Okun which is essays on crafting about the life truths that you learn through different crafting projects. I think it sounds really interesting and human and beautiful. And we’re going to be joined by the writer, Alanna Okun for next episode.
GIN JENNY: Which is exciting. I have so many questions about crafting, because I am a terrible, non-crafty person. I can’t make anything.
WHISKEY JENNY: I’m hoping that we— I’m hoping she gives us all the crafting hacks.
GIN JENNY: Exactly. I think probably one of them is going to be, you can’t get upset if you’re not perfect at it right away. Which I think is the fundamental reason that I’m not a good crafter.
WHISKEY JENNY: Ah, yes. Well, that is a large hump to overcome.
GIN JENNY: It’s not the best thing about me as a human.
WHISKEY JENNY: But you’re a great human, though.
GIN JENNY: Oh, you are.
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, thanks for listening. This has been the Reading the End bookcast with the demographically similar Jennys. And a big thank you again to Andrew Santella for joining us. You can visit the blog at readingtheend.com. You can follow us on Twitter @readingtheend. We’re both on Goodreads as Whiskey Jenny and Gin Jenny. You can email us— please do— at readingtheend@gmail.com. And if you’re listening to us on iTunes, please leave us a review.
And until next time, a quote from The Whites, by Richard Price. “We’ve seen it all, handled it all, and when a young person dies, we’ve all walked up the stairs, knocked on the doors, and delivered the news between us to an army of parents. We’ve caught them on their way to the floor, carried them into the bedroom or living room, then gone into their kitchens and brought them water. Over the years an ocean of water, glass by glass by glass.”
THEME SONG: You don’t judge a book by its cover. Page one’s not a much better view. And shortly you’re gonna discover the middle won’t mollify you. So whether whiskey’s your go-to or you’re like my gin-drinking friend, no matter what you are imbibing, you’ll be better off in the end reading the end.