By David Shapiro

Saturday, February 22, 1997

Procrastination can be
a manager’s friend

TIME management pros say you'll never get anywhere in life if you can't stop procrastinating. That may be true but, if you want to get any work done once you reach your destination, creative procrastination can be your best friend.

We're obsessed with saving time. Popular magazines offer time-saving tips month after month. Libraries are full of advice on organizing your life. Procrastination, the mantra goes, is our greatest enemy. Do it now, they scold. Don't ever let work pile up.

I take the opposite view based on this premise: It's amazing how many problems disappear if you procrastinate long enough. And the best part is that there often are no negative consequences to ignoring problems.

Take paper management, for instance. Experts say the key is to never touch a piece of paper more than once. When you pick it up either act on it, file it, pass it on to somebody else or throw it away.

That's fine, except that you could spend all day processing paper. You give up control of your own agenda. You let the people who send you paper decide how you'll spend your time.

My theory of handling paper has two rules. No. 1 is that it doesn't matter how many times you touch a piece of paper. The key is to keep it moving from one pile to another until it becomes moot, out of date or otherwise superfluous. Then you throw it away. Rule No. 2 is to never file anything you can get from somebody else's files.

My paper starts in my "in" basket. I go through it every day to pick out the few things that look important and deal with them. I ignore the rest. After a while, the pile of paper I'm ignoring grows to mountainous heights so I take it out of the basket and pile it on my desk.

When the pile on my desk passes two feet, it becomes an industrial hazard so I start sticking papers in folders. I have many of these - "pending," "to do," "hold," "general," "miscellaneous." I know the folders have vague names that all mean the same thing, but it doesn't matter. I rarely look in them anyway.

About once a year, it gets to the point where the "in" basket is collapsing from its own weight, the pile of paper on my desk is blocking my fire exit and my folders are bursting.

That's when I simply throw everything away and start over. By then, I've been ignoring it for up to a year and nothing bad has happened. Why keep it any longer?

My current pile, for instance, contains three revisions of a capital purchase plan. How would I feel if I had spent a lot of time fooling with the first version only to have two more come along making my efforts pointless?

There's also a letter from a reader calling me "arrogant and ignorant." I was going to answer, but I'm glad I ignored it. It would have just made both of us mad. Besides, he's right. Sometimes I am arrogant and ignorant.

The last time I purged my paper, people did double-takes when they looked into my office and could actually see me. It started a persistent round of wishful thinking among the staff that I was cleaning out to leave the Star-Bulletin.

There is one file I keep tidy and current - the nut file. Former Star-Bulletin senior editor John Simonds taught me to keep material from members of the lunatic fringe close at hand so if they ever return I can say, "Yessir, Mr. Fruitcake, I have your proposal right here."

It may be enough to keep someone from pulling out a cannon and blowing me into the afterlife. If he lays me low anyway, at least I leave a piece of evidence for police.