TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

I’m going to begin with a confession: I can be a procrastinator. I don’t think that’s unusual; a lot of my friends, including plenty of writers, also find themselves putting off tasks until the last minute. Sometimes it’s because the task just isn’t that appealing, so it’s hard to feel motivated to do it. Sometimes the project is so enormous, it’s hard to get started.

Recently, I told a friend that I had procrastinated a task, and so I had to really hustle to get it done on time, and she kindly corrected me. Or, rather, she reframed what I was calling procrastination as something else: triage. That’s what she called it. She said, “You have so much to do, you have to triage tasks — tackle the big and immediate ones first, and let some of the smaller ones go for a bit.” She had a point. I didn’t have a time management issue or a lack of focus. I was juggling multiple tasks, and that meant that some of them naturally had to wait. 

Our conversation spurred me to do a little research into the positive side of procrastination, if there is one. And there is! One upside to delaying completion of a task is that you have more time to think about it and gather information. So procrastinating can actually lead to better decision-making.  You’re also less likely to put off projects that you’re passionate about, meaning that procrastination reveals what’s really important to you. Delaying a task is telling you something about what you do — and don’t — want to be doing in your life.

Today's poem calls itself an essay — the first kind of essay most of us learn to write in school. It uses the idea of a now-faraway form to explore memories and places that feel faraway, too, yet all against the urgency of procrastination.

Five Paragraph Essay on Time
by Kathleen Flenniken

More than once I blew off my high school essays 
to watch TV, set an alarm for 5 a.m.
and dragged out of bed to a desk 
in the still-dark living room window.

Nervous about finishing, no chance to revise,
I launched sentences with my blue pen
like bodies jumping out of buildings on fire.

The scene outside when I lifted my head
shifted from my own reflection
to a pencil sketch of a street and front yard,
framed in my mother’s proud bay window
in our otherwise plain-faced house.

The loops of my words leaned like they meant
what they said. I’d look up to catch a light blink on, 
beams of a passing car, our big sycamore,
then plunge again into my evidence—
essay and morning emerging
like bean sprouts in a milk carton.

Fifty years later 
a car smashed through the bay window
where I wrote and watched the dawn.
We sold the house years ago,
no one was home,
but I sit at the center of destruction,
writing and running out of time.

"Five Paragraph Essay on Time" by Kathleen Flenniken from DRESSING IN THE DARK © 2025 Kathleen Flenniken. Used by permission of the poet and Lynx House Press.