Confessions of a Recovering Procrastinator
written by Dawn M. Norfleet
2019 GLFCAM Chou Wen-chung Fellow, Cycle 10
I'm a recovering procrastinator. If you're not one and never were, the following may be for someone else out there.
Let's start with a college confession: Early in Professor Owen Jander's music history course, we were given a listening assignment of Monteverdi's seminal early 17th century opera, L'Orfeo. In the mid-80s, there was no digitally-uploaded music on a university network to conveniently stream listening assignments on a cell phone with ear buds. In order to do the listening assignment, we had to be physically present at the music library, and listening assignments could take a chunk out of a day. We'd check out the assigned LP from the reserve desk, then sequester ourselves in the music library basement room with its old wood-paneled console. Since there were only one or two LPs, you had to plan ahead which meant listening with others.
For this particular assignment, I hadn't yet completed the listening by its due date. Less than one hour before Prof. Jander’s class was to start with a discussion on the short opera, I fretted about my lack of preparation but I had an epiphany and came up with a creative solution to the problem I had created for myself: I'd listen to L'Orfeo in its entirety on the 45 RPM setting, rather than the normal LP format of 33 1/2 RPM, to get through the opera faster! If you're familiar with the opera, imagine how absolutely ridiculous this sounded, especially with the vocal embellishments characteristic of the Early Baroque era. If you're not hip to the opera, imagine a frantic, miniature orchestra with singers on helium. (N.B.: Despite my "diss" to Monteverdi, he is still one of my favorite composers.)
For a very long time, longer than I care to admit with specifics, I saw pretty much any deadline as a huge monster to be loathed and feared… Whether a second-grade book report I called "Hooray for Snakes" on the joys of reptilian interest sparked by a classroom pet, or college papers on jazz or the ethics of eating meat, as each deadline approached, I'd feel anxious.
A familiar cycle ensued. All these mental recordings of "You're not smart, you can't do it" added to my self-flagellation for being "dumb for not preparing ahead of time." In grade school, I'd put my poor mother, who was a teacher by day while getting her master's degree by night, through the last-minute mill of typing my paper out on the typewriter. (Yes, this was before computers when a Corona was a name on a typewriter and not a beer, and you had awkward correction ribbon if you were lucky.) My mom, not without complaint, would type the bulk of my research papers in grade school until I had to type my own in college. My first successful attempt at learning how to use a computer was the night before a paper was due, when I forced myself to learn the clunky WordPerfect word processing program just enough to squeeze through a five-page research paper… I think it was on Monteverdi, in fact!
I was in a familiar cycle of: Deadline, fear, procrastination, asking for an extension, getting points deducted for late work, and beating myself up mentally. Thankfully, the work I did submit tended to range from very good to excellent. But why couldn't I just get the work in on time?
I used to jokingly blame my lateness on my time of birth: I was born at 11:59PM, and I've been doing everything at the last minute ever since.
This pattern continued up to my fourth year in grad school. I'd transitioned from Music Composition to Ethnomusicology at Columbia University (that's another story). At some point then, I asked myself: What IF the myriad of folks telling me to plan my schedule weren't wrong? What was it like to methodically plan out things on the calendar? What if this wasn't as impossible and weird as I'd thought? Part of this re-thinking possibly happened as apprehension about the prospect of having to write a dissertation for my Ph.D. began. I had been anxious about not getting in all my work in time to graduate from college in four years (which I had done without issue.). But a dissertation? I didn't know how I was going to conquer that.
Somehow, it finally sank into my brain that I was tired of fear. I even began to fear that fear. In fact, I began to loathe that feeling caused by procrastination even more than the project itself. Like I'd said earlier, procrastination coping skills sparked creative solutions to self-invoked problems.
I had some pretty intense courses this one term in addition to my budding field work in underground hip-hop. I'd just begun to put all deadlines in my appointment book faithfully, with warning marks at six weeks, one month, and two weeks. Methodically, I'd add detail with exactly what would happen on each of those days. Also, a dear friend who was a few years ahead of me as a grad student in historical musicology, told me something that profoundly made the whole dissertation-thing un-terrifying and actually achievable. She explained: In grad school, you're typically expected to do extensive research projects of twenty to forty pages on various topics, which often relate to what ends up being a dissertation project. Her advice? Approach the dissertation as a series of twenty-page papers that are on different aspects of my research! I understood this as the way this little ant could take down the elephant, one bite at a time. Instead of psyching myself out, I began to psych myself up.
During this thought-transition period, I faced a profound test to my newfound triumph over deadline anxiety and procrastination. It happened at the end of an intense fall semester course load one Friday. After turning in — on time — the first of three twenty-page research papers due between that day and the following Monday (when I also had a class-long oral presentation to give), I decided to give myself a treat. I walked over to the West End Cafe to enjoy a couple of sets of live classic soul music before returning to the grind the following morning. On top of all of the academic work going on, I was excited about my upcoming first "big" gig the following week with a band at the popular jazz club, Birdland. What I was learning was that I have the ability to do quality work in a short amount of time. And most importantly, I was learning to separate the pressure and anxiety about a project from the project itself. I didn't need to associate the task with the terror. I thought of myself as a hamster on a wheel — Once fallen off, it's difficult to get back on. So, keeping myself in the spin became a priority. Figuring out how to re-enter a spinning wheel in motion before me was dangerously anxiety-producing. I'd vowed to myself that I would not ask for extensions! After shooting the breeze with my musician friends at the venue that Friday night, I crossed the campus to go back to the grad school apartment I shared with three strangers.
A few hours later, my mom called me around 3:00 A.M. from California to inform me that my father had finally succumbed to cancer. Initially, I was numb before feeling a sense of grief, not just because of the death of my distant father, but because I also felt the hint of a familiar fear returning. How I handled it wasn't something I would recommend to anyone, but it's the way I felt I could handle everything without looking at that dreaded hamster wheel spinning without me, figuring out how to jump into it again. I decided to go forward with my presentation, turned in one of the twenty-page papers on Monday, and got one extension for a week later. For Monday's presentation, I remember my mouth opening and lips moving for the forty-five minutes… I don't know what I said.
And I did the Birdland concert that following Friday. My rationale had been that my father, as a life-long musician ever on the hustle, would have understood. I remember nothing about it, however. I do recall others being surprised (and concerned) that I'd stuck around instead of immediately heading home. In fact, I don't even remember when I returned home to California. By the time I got there, all the arrangements had been made. His new family had taken care of everything. On a side note, the obituary noted that my father was survived by two sons: Michael and Don. Oh well.
Although I neither congratulate nor condemn myself for not being present for my father's memorial arrangements that winter, I truly felt that I needed to prove to myself that I could stay on that wheel without being thrown off, early in this new experiment. It was critical to my success, my well-being, my ability to achieve.
For my remaining four years in grad school, I endured the crazy changes that were made in the requirements to get to the writing stage of the dissertation, as the department went through a reworking. Concurrently, I began teaching a class in New Jersey, conducted my most intense field work, and had just discovered the rich jazz scene in New York. That time was also when I first identified as the start of my parallel career as a professional musician, and started doing "The Hang". I went from procrastinator to achiever. I learned I could actually produce quality work in a short period of time without all that toxic anxiety as long as I carefully mapped things out, kept on the wheel, and developed confidence.
My takeaways during this period: Procrastination is based on fear. It is a fear of failure that I may not have the ability to focus and achieve what is expected of me, and that people will be disappointed in me and doubt my intelligence and skills and gifts, which would augment my own insecurities. It is also the result of a fear of success: That achieving these goals may set the bar of expectation higher and higher, possibly sparking doubt in my ability to achieve these newer expectations.
In essence, fear of failure and fear of success are two sides of the same coin.
I don't see myself as someone who has totally conquered the urge to put off stuff. Things at the micro level still need work, and those are new goals to conquer: Getting to the bank more than thirty seconds before closing (or just after the door closes), honoring a commitment with my mom to be on time, and remembering to get gas before the "empty" warning light flashes. But that's more of an issue of time management than genuine stress about a huge project. I'm grateful that I have had the chance to work through this, on my own terms, in a way that makes sense to me. I HAVE BIG THINGS TO ACCOMPLISH IN MY LIFE, AND THESE ARE MUCH GREATER THAN ANY SELF-IMPOSED STUMBLING BLOCK THAT WOULD IMPEDE MY GOALS.
As I write this last sentence, it is about five minutes before my extended deadline. I asked for an extension not because I'd waited until the last minute. It's because of multiple due dates all happening in the same time period. But I value my commitment, and others' faith in me. That faith, rather than pressure and fear, is something I welcome and celebrate, and that fuels me.
Dawn Norfleet is a Los Angeles-based vocalist, flutist and composer, whose eclectic influences include traditional and contemporary jazz, Stevie Wonder, and Claudio Monteverdi. Learn more from Dawn’s bio page.