The ADHD Diaries: Why I Always Succumb to the Allure of Procrastination (and Then Hate Myself for It)

As befitting my subject, I waited past the last minute to write this column

Before I get to the column, here’s a final reminder that last-minute tickets to our debut event, NYC personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live, are still available! If you’re seeing it as sold out but really want to attend, email us at opensecretsmag at gmail.com and if any tickets are available I’ll make sure you get one.

Not to brag, but I’m an expert procrastinator. I have plenty of experience, going back to writing my college applications in the middle of the night, my baby blanket draped over my halogen lamp so my mom wouldn’t see.

You’d think that at 49, I might have learned a thing or two about why procrastination isn’t worth it, but I haven’t. I thought it was just my personal flaw, a failing that would plague me forever, and while it may indeed follow me throughout my life, I’ve since learned that procrastination and ADHD are tied together.

According to the magazine ADDitude:

You procrastinate because you’re unable to effectively regulate your own emotions — a trademark symptom of ADHD.

In the past few months, I’ve procrastinated on a lot of tasks, big and small. Sometimes I tell myself that I need to wait for inspiration “to strike,” which the above-linked article also points to as an ADHD trait. Other times, I swear to myself that tomorrow will be the day I finally tackle whatever it is I’ve been avoiding.

But once I’ve allowed myself to procrastinate once, it’s very, very easy for me to keep doing it, so that “tomorrow” becomes “the next day” and the next and the next until I either give up on what I wanted to do, I run out of time, or I finally finish it.

What’s deeply ironic is that when I’m procrastinating, I’ve never simply forgotten about what I’m not working on. I’m thinking about it every day, whether that looks like adding it to my to-do list or simply shooting an arrow of guilt into myself, one that prevents me from fully enjoying the rest of my life. No matter what else I accomplish on a given day, when I’m procrastinating and know I shouldn’t be, that invades any sense of pride I take in my work.

Today is a perfect example. There’s been a lot about Open Secrets Live, which I’ve been working on since last fall, that I planned to do to make it the best event possible. I researched dozens of companies I wanted to ask to sponsor it, but between freelance work, editing, and spending most of my time with my baby, I kept pushing that to the side. I told myself there was still plenty of time, and there was, but I never prioritized it, and then suddenly there wasn’t any time left. So while those contacts are still valuable for future outreach, I potentially missed out on having some of the costs of the event subsidized rather than me paying for them myself.

In other situations, I’m nervous about doing something, so I procrastinate in the hope that I’ll magically become less nervous one day. I’ve been meaning to try to find a venue for an informal afterparty for Open Secrets Live, but the idea of cold calling a venue (or anyone) is terrifying to me. Cold emailing is bad enough, but phone calls? No thank you.

So rather than just facing that fear and knocking it off my list, I waited until the day before the event. I picked a venue from the list of local ones I was given, called, and within five minutes, the arrangements had been made.

Of course, it’s not always so simple. I recently turned in a large project that I procrastinated on that turned out to be very challenging. I kept telling myself I just needed to carve out enough time, and once I had that, my mind would start whirring and spinning words into flowing sentences that zipped smoothly from one paragraph to the next.

Instead, it was more like I banged out a very rough draft, and then painstakingly went back and filled in a quote here, a transition there. I had to do a lot of wrangling and research and simply sitting with the discomfort of knowing that something I was excited about when I first proposed it hadn’t gotten any easier in the ensuing months, but had actually solidified into something that felt near impossible.

The sad fact I try to avoid when I procrastinate is that striving for perfection is always going to make me unhappy, yet I con myself into believing that if I just wait (meaning procrastinate) long enough, I will somehow approach perfection (or get as close as I can). Even if that were true, which seems doubtful given the vast majority of my experience, there's still the tradeoff of the mental agony of having that task hanging over my head.

Sometimes I think the solution is simply to stop planning projects or pitching things that could lead me back into procrastination mode. But I don’t want to be a coward, and while my work/life balance has changed in the last year, I still have big dreams I want to give myself a chance at fulfilling.

What I need to reckon with is the fact that I might try my hardest and still fail, or succeed on one level but still feel like a failure, because in my head, I still have some pristine vision of what a project could have been, if only (if only what, I can never articulate, but I still berate myself for not living up to my high standards).

With procrastination, I always let myself believe that the blank page is preferable to word salad tossed around haphazardly, as if the blank page has some answers I can divine from it if I stare at it long enough. That’s a metaphorical blank page, because I don’t even let myself open up a new Word document when I’m deep in procrastination mode; instead I fill my time with other tasks that I deem more urgent, lest I desecrate that blank page with work that feels subpar.

I sometimes feel ridiculous for writing this column, both because I’m baring some of my most embarrassing behind-the-scenes moments of how I operate, and because when I type it all out, it feels obvious that procrastination isn’t ultimately helping me. I both know that, and resist that knowledge, all the time.

I’m scared that by stating so publicly that I’m a procrastinator nobody will want to work with me ever again because that’s all they’ll see. Part of the reason I’m writing it, though, is the same reason I’ve written about anything I perceive as problematic or embarrassing: in the hope that by taking it outside of my own brain and all its scurrying machinations and putting it into the public eye, I’ll feel more beholden to a power outside myself next time I’m in that situation.

Will it actually work? I’m not sure, but I know that the past few months living in procrastion hell have only made me miserable, so hopefully I’ll use the memory of that challenging time to help me make smarter choices next time.