Postponing everything for later is not necessarily negative. In him A little praise for the delay, writer Emmanuel Willin goes against the grain and gives us his delightful and humorous take on the art of lazing around, procrastinating, and giving back.
Every personal development manual found in bookstores today confirms this. procrastination is bad, and it is imperative to overcome this tendency to put off until tomorrow what can be done today. In fact, all these manuals want to “train” people to be more efficient and effective under the guise of improving well-being and personal balance as a business that has to ‘perform’ at all costs, to use the modern vocabulary…”.
This is how Emmanuel Willin, author of novels, speaks Kim Philby and me (Ed. Stock, 2024), as well as a In praise of delay * where erudition meets humor.Based on his own experience as a writer, he refutes the common notion that procrastination is a handicap to be eradicated and highlights how it is also a source of enrichment.
The way of creation
So the time that appears to be devoted to something other than the goal we had can ultimately make it possible to achieve it, especially in terms of creativity. the landscape, the nature, the weather, the art, my wanderings in Paris, my wanderings on the Internet. Letting myself be absorbed by all that I discover feeds my knowledge, my imagination, my sensitivity,” the novelist notes. Even when we are not writing, we are writing, in short…
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Furthermore, hasty work can be more productive than continuous work, because many artistic compositions need a burst of stress to reveal themselves. not progressing in small steps over months, but immediately, through long maturation and permeable to the world around them the result of a willingness to be.” Therefore, procrastination means reclaiming your time to make the best use of it.
The call of the living
However, procrastination is not a panacea. when it comes to fighting poverty or global warming, it is ill-advised. “He makes us laugh because he accumulates mistakes, but we also notice that the time he does not spend at work is spent inventing things and often making the lives of his colleagues more fun, practical, even if it often ends is. in gag. Does not work because he does not want to work. and even if he tries not to work, he will implement all kinds of ingenious strategies, think, imagine… He is not a robot who is encouraged to be “initiative” without even knowing what that means has been on albums since the early 1970s, however, today we know that capitalism and the economy must absolutely take the environment into account…”
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Time was restored
Our vision of procrastination is also conditioned by the Western world’s relationship with time. “Monochronic societies like ours think of time as linear, when in polychronic societies, mostly in southern countries, we have several times: professional time, intimate time, family time. And one can take precedence over the other sometimes, and that’s okay. If we don’t go to a meeting because we have to solve a family problem, that’s accepted, and no one else does dying, on the contrary. We consider that we are going to solve a personal problem that will serve professional life. We don’t do one to the detriment of the other, there is no separation between personal life and professional life.” So, procrastination can also mean doing several things at the same time…
* Éditions Les Pérégrines, 178 p., €13.90.
Source: Le Figaro
