PROCRASTINATION
DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE
PROCRASTINATION
by Adam Carroll Draper
If there is a single common outlook shared by my wife (Stefanie) and my parents, it is that they despise waste and procrastination. Yet they love me. I don’t really waste time, and I accomplish a lot by any objective standard (because I must!). But it is fair to say that they all believe that I am inefficient.
Perhaps this is better understood by perspective. If my dad appreciates the slogan “do it now,” I might be a little more tolerant of the adage, “why do today what you can put off until tomorrow.” I mean, I have experimented with the idea of rushing to do a bunch of stuff to make time for fun. It is sort of like eating all the vegetables first so you can enjoy the rest your meal. My experience of the uber-productive, however, is that they don’t tend to get around to having fun. This is true in much the same way that by the time you eat all the spinach and kale (oh kale no!), the good food isn’t hot any more.
I am not extolling procrastination. Again, I merely offer perspective. Leonardo da Vinci was a famous procrastinator, for instance. It took him sixteen years to paint the Mona Lisa. In fact, he only finished something like twenty paintings in his whole life (if any of them were finished at all to his satisfaction). Imagine the void we would endure in ignorance if we were bereft of their beauty. Are they worth enduring the agony of Leonardo’s wretched procrastination?
The downside to procrastination is that it tends to dovetail with the law of unintended consequences in a way that exponentially intensifies guilt and angst. If those two voices (guilt and angst) are not from God – and they are not, then it is good to at least try to avoid being beset by them. Using guilt and angst to motivate yourself to avoid procrastination, however, employs the same voices! (Selah).
The law of unintended consequences is as immutable as any other law of nature, and the effects tend to be as painfully endured as those suffered when other such laws are overlooked (such as gravity, for example). One of my oldest and dearest friends experienced the unintended consequences of his own procrastination recently. Some years ago, he ignored a $300 fine on some rental property he owns in Florida. In the process of selling that land, he discovered that the $300 fine he never got around to investigating is now over $300,000! He hired a real estate agent to appear for him at the hearing of his request to have the fine reduced, and the magistrate (somewhat less than magnanimously) cut the fine in half. Now he has no choice but to sell the property just to satisfy the county’s lien.
This is where things get… uhm… curiouser and curiouser. I don’t want to bore you with how administrative law functions here, but I am going to offer some more detail of my friend’s case to further illustrate how our (America’s) procrastination with respect to letting our administrative state grow unchecked for sixty or seventy years is causing us to endure the law of unintended consequences. The magistrate who heard my friend’s case is a lawyer, who the state of Florida hired to hear property owners’ requests for fine reductions. He made his decision based upon certain “findings of fact” and “conclusions of law.” Now, my friend wants to appeal that decision. If he does appeal, he may be able to have an actual judge hear his case, but that judge will not be able to give him a new trial (called a “trial de novo”) in which the judge could make his own “findings of fact” and “conclusions of law.” No, the judge’s review on appeal is essentially limited to whether the magistrates’ ruling made any sense at all (that is, was there a basis in reality for what he found to be fact and was he right about the law he applied).
Bear with me for a second. The reason I am burdening you with this meandering legal mess is to point out that my friend was always at the mercy of what the magistrate decided. This is the same process our state and federal governments use, too. It is how administrative law works. Think about it this way. Let’s say a farmer wants to put a bridge over a stream in his back pasture and he is denied a permit to do it because the EPA has determined that a tiny, orange frog that lives in the stream is endangered. For the same reasons my friend is sort of stuck with what the magistrate decided, so is the farmer. There is relatively no point in appealing.
Multiply this process by every city, county, state and federal agency, and you come to understand how (according to Phillip K. Howard in The Death of Common Sense) America has more written rules governing how we live our daily lives than every other country in the world combined – for all of human history. We are the most highly regulated society in the history of mankind, but we call it freedom!
There is a school of thought centered around the proposition that how the Federal Government applies administrative law is unconstitutional because it cedes too much authority from the legislative branch to the executive. There is not one shadow of doubt that the growth and reach of our leviathan state has been the (unintended?) consequence of our acquiescence to how administrative agencies function and the law they apply to do so. Debate over this is now a nearly silent (to us) rage among the wonks in DC, however, because the Trump Administration has taken the position that the very fundamentals of administrative law that I just described are unconstitutional. If you want to look into this, read Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in Department of Transportation vs. Association of American Railroads, 135 S.Ct. 1225 (2015).
America is experiencing an awakening to the reality of the leviathan state to which we have unknowingly acquiesced. Whether it was due to procrastination or because we were not warned of the danger, we most certainly did not intend these consequences. It is sad to think that we might rather have various government agencies be as inclined to procrastination and indecision as they are to waste and inefficiency. We might be a lot safer in the long run.
If you got anything out of this missive, please give it a thumbs up, comment and/or share it. It helps. I sincerely appreciate that you took the time to read it.