Procrastinator. From Latin procrastinare. This essential profile in the world of work even has its world day: March 25. But before thinking about the office, you have to go back a few years, on the school benches, to assess the talent of a procrastinator. Studies by psychologist Walter Mischel at Stanford University have revealed that procrastination is due to a lack of learning about self-control. Thus, parents have a very important role in the development - or not - of their children in procrastination. If at 18, you revise your bac two days before the first test, it is obviously because self-control is somewhat approximate. Likewise a few years later, if the writing of a 100-page thesis takes two days and two nights, under the inexorable constraint of the deadline! These behaviors condition the continuation in professional life…
Read also: "The people who matter at the office" # 14: The tourist!
At the office, the procrastinator applies Mark Twain's words to the letter: never put off until tomorrow what you can do the next day. In the open space, our procrastinator-in-chief is easily identified: he does not have a great passion for reporting and reports very little on the progress of his projects to his superior. Or else he kicks in touch. He seeks to save time even if he loses procrastinating! On his desk, which is often untidy, he accumulates to-do-lists which he never manages to complete. He loses the thread, starts again ... The same task can appear on three or four different post-it notes, week after week, depending on its degree of urgency. For larger missions with very strict deadlines, however, it is different. It is not uncommon to see our procrastinator staying late at the office, on a Friday evening: he tackled at 4 p.m. the same day a dense file that he must return on Monday.
The emergency is an absolutely relative and very personal data for the aspiring procrastinator. A telephone meeting or a meeting that takes place in half an hour and that is still not prepared is not a major emergency: it will wait the last five minutes to get down to it. In telework, it is worse: the procrastinator drowns enters the personal and professional to-do that he blithely blends. The question "what is my priority?" opens on metaphysical vertigo…
For the benefit of this column, do not hesitate to share your own experience of important people by writing to qperinel@lefigaro.fr.
