On Procrastination

This has taken me awhile.

Procrastination is often mistaken for laziness. But laziness has never been my problem—I’ve stayed endlessly busy circling the things that have mattered most.

For decades, procrastination has rerouted my life—not as a single dramatic choice, but as an invisible force, shaping my days in ways I haven’t always noticed. It has been a shield and a cage, it has hurled me into motion and stranded me in place.

Part of the strange psychology of procrastination has been this: it has felt so bound up with tasks uniquely mine that I’ve been convinced no one else struggles quite the way I do. And yet, I’ve known everyone does—that procrastination is universal, an affliction we all quietly shoulder. To live inside both beliefs at once has meant being both the exception and the unexceptional: singularly marked and yet no different from anyone else. That paradox has bred a peculiar loneliness—the sense of being set apart while also carrying the shame of failing at the most ordinary struggle of all.

Raised in the open spaces of the American West, I came of age in places where silence was never empty and where time seemed to stretch and collapse depending on how you looked at it. Later, I found myself in work that thrived on urgency—high-stress, high-stakes jobs where hesitation was a liability and quick thinking could change everything. Oddly, those pressure-cooker rooms have felt like home. The adrenaline has matched something I was already carrying. But in the quieter corners of my life, in the hours no one else has been watching, I have lost entire days to avoidance, to circling, to delay.

This is a place for me to write about that paradox: how we can be sharp under fire and yet undone by the smallest task. How procrastination hasn’t really been about productivity but about fear, perfection, control, and the very human wish to step outside of time.

I don’t have a five-step plan to fix this. I’m not interested in quick cures or bullet-point wisdom. What I want is to look at procrastination with honesty, and maybe tenderness—to see what it has taught me about how we live, and how we long to live differently.

What I want—someday—is a night that ends without a single undone thing tugging at me. A night where the lists have fallen silent, and I can rest without bargaining with tomorrow.

If you’ve ever carried something undone from one to-do list to the next until the paper wore thin, or if you’ve ever sat at the edge of a decision for months, years, even decades—then you already know this terrain. I’m just here to map it alongside you.

Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.

—Harper Grant