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Interview
Neil Stokes - 2 July 2017 2.00 h

The art of procrastination

Màrius Serra Every Monday, English Hour airs the interview series Going Native. This time Neil talks to writer and wordsmith, Màrius Serra about his book on managing time.
- Neil Stokes
Tell us about your book on time man­age­ment, D’on trec el temps (Where I Find the Time).
I started writ­ing about time when wait­ing for some­one to go to a lit­er­ary event. I started not­ing down some re­flec­tions about how im­por­tant time is in our lives, and I re­alised that it is a uni­ver­sal and con­tem­po­rary issue. Every­one is now very aware of time, and not just work time but all as­pects of our lives. And it turned into this very pe­cu­liar book, in which every chap­ter has a sort of essay but also a fic­tional text, such as short sto­ries or poems about time. It’s a very play­ful book and I’m not sure how to label it.
I’ve started to value time more than money. Is that a nat­ural part of get­ting older, or is it due to the so­ci­ety we live in today?
Well, it’s both things. When you are young you don’t think so much about time, but as you get older you have more time be­hind you, and you start think­ing about it more and giv­ing it more value. Time and money are sim­i­lar but dif­fer­ent. You spend money but you can earn more, while time can only be spent and you can never earn more time.
How is the mod­ern, dig­i­tal world al­ter­ing our view of time?
I think there’s a change in the per­cep­tion of time be­cause we now think about time all the time. Tech­nol­ogy gives us more pos­si­bil­i­ties, such as faster travel or being able to com­mu­ni­cate with peo­ple on the other side of the world, so there’s no doubt our per­cep­tion of time is chang­ing. Time has been there for the his­tory of hu­man­ity, but now we are more aware of its im­por­tance, and so we think more about how to use our time. It is a ques­tion of per­cep­tion, I think.
There are in­creas­ing ways and de­vices for sav­ing time. Are we re­ally sav­ing time or just mak­ing space for even more de­mands on our time?
That makes me think of the philoso­pher and writer Henry David Thoreau, the au­thor of Walden. Some­one told him that there are now planes that can take him to New York in half-an-hour. And his an­swer was: “What for? What am I going to do in New York?” I think some­times we don’t ask our­selves the cor­rect ques­tions. It is not easy to find these ques­tions but I think it’s im­por­tant. The book doesn’t pre­tend to offer a mag­i­cal for­mula for doing lots of things in less time, but some­times you have to ‘lose’ your time, you have to pause. It’s a ques­tion of at­ti­tude, I think. In my case, I am a very hy­per­ac­tive man and all my life I have al­ways done lots of things, but what I try to do now is stop much more than I used to. When you stop, then maybe you can start again faster. If you don’t pause, you are al­ways in a rush and it ends in cat­a­stro­phe for your life be­cause you feel as if you are not get­ting any­where.
Is the key not to worry about what you have to do when there’s no time to do every­thing or it’s too late?
It’s the only way to go be­cause we live in an in­for­ma­tion-sat­u­rated so­ci­ety and so we get over­whelmed by lots of things. By los­ing your time I refer to a strange word that I love: pro­cras­ti­na­tion. You have lots of oblig­a­tions to get on with, but then you get stuck on some­thing that is of par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est to you and you won­der whether you can af­ford the time, but you do it any­way. Ob­vi­ously you can’t do that all the time, or you’ll never get any­thing done, but if it makes you hap­pier be­cause you are pas­sion­ate about this thing, you will be bet­ter able to do the rest of things you have to do af­ter­wards. I have come across lots of things when I wasn’t look­ing for them. It’s im­por­tant to work in a fo­cused man­ner, but some­times when you take a wind­ing de­tour you can find some of the most im­por­tant things in your life. For in­stance, I found my first palin­drome [phrase that reads the same back­ward as for­ward, such as madam] in an en­cy­clo­pe­dia when I was at uni­ver­sity and maybe for four or five weeks I didn’t go to classes be­cause I was in the li­brary read­ing that en­cy­clo­pe­dia. I had dis­cov­ered a pas­sion that years later has be­come my job and one of my spe­cial­i­ties. That day I was pro­cras­ti­nat­ing; I wasn’t work­ing like a good stu­dent get­ting every­thing done that I had to do. Some­times im­por­tance and ur­gency are not on the same level.
A lot of peo­ple might say that word games, or in my case video games, are a waste of time. But surely your pas­sion for them jus­ti­fies the time they take up?
A good friend of mine is Oriol Comas, an ex­pert on games, and he says: play every sin­gle day of your life and you will be much hap­pier, be­cause play­ing is in­ter­act­ing, and when you are in­ter­act­ing, you are hav­ing an ex­pe­ri­ence, like going to the the­atre or a con­cert, which are ex­pe­ri­ences. Many of these ex­pe­ri­ences –play­ing is one of them– have lit­tle so­cial pres­tige be­cause they are often seen as child­ish. But I love to play, in my case word games, and it is very en­rich­ing ex­pe­ri­ence.
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