Procrastinate? I'll do it later (Anne Rooney)

 Do you procrastinate? Put off until next week what you should be doing, or writing, today? You're in good company. 

Feeling bad about how far behind I am on everything, I got even further behind by thinking about why we don't do things. It turns out lots of great people have put things off for much longer than me (and probably you, unless you are a champion-league procrastinator). How do you compare with these?

Isaac Newton supposedly came up with his theory of gravity while shielding from the plague in 1666. But like most of us who come up with a great idea in a pandemic, he didn't actually publish it until more than 20 years later, in 1687.

Nicolaus Copernicus decided that the planets, including Earth, orbit the Sun (rather than everything, including the Sun, orbiting Earth) but didn't publish until he was within months of his death. That's really leaving things to the last minute.*

Charles Darwin took a long boat trip in 1831–36 and thought about the animals and rocks he saw. He published his theory of evolution in Origin of Species in 1859. It's not quite that it took him that long to work it out, as he'd got the idea in the 1830s. He just put off publishing it while he played around with barnacles and collected more evidence (sound familiar? not the barnacles, the evidence). In 1858, Alfred Russell Wallace sent Darwin his own work, which was basically the same idea. Darwin was shocked into action. (They both published in the same month in the end).

Then there are novelists. Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960 and worked on another novel that never saw the light of day. (We'll draw a veil over Go Set a Watchman, published in 2015, the year before her death, and which is only an early draft of TKAM.) Boris Pasternak wrote only Doctor Zhivago. Maybe winning a Nobel Prize for Literature but being forbidden by the Soviet government to accept it put him off bothering with a second. Even so, some of it was written in 1910 and it wasn't finished until 1956. 

You're in good company if you are still procrastinating. I could list all the things I didn't do in lockdown, but that I had always assumed I would do if I had time. But I can't be bothered. For now I have some procrastinating to do. Or maybe I'll do that tomorrow. 

*We might let Copernicus off, as he would have known the Catholic Church would have taken a dim view of his godless idea. Nearly 100 years later, Galileo was investigated by the Inquisition for teaching that Earth goes around the Sun, and spent his last years under house arrest.

Anne Rooney

website (long in need of updating, proof of my expertise in procrastintion) 

Latest book: Story of the Universe, Arcturus, 2021