Pro*crastinate: from the Latin, for (in favor of) tomorrow (the day following this one). How has it come to have such a bad reputation, this pro-future stance? Even the dictionary takes a dim view. Using the word in context, the National Heritage offers to procrastinate until an opportunity is lost, when it seems to me that the more hopeful procrastinate until the optimal situation presents itself would serve equally well.

Feed "procrastination" to an Internet search engine, and you'll find dozens of sites devoted to helping people overcome any temptation to save (I prefer this to the more biased delay) a task until tomorrow. "Are You A Procrastinator?" demand the folks at Carleton University's Procrastination Research Group. Apparently many of you are. Seventeen percent of respondents to a poll asking To what extent is procrastination having a negative impact on your happiness? said that it was having an "extreme negative effect." Another 46 percent answered "very much" or "quite a bit," and 28 percent voted for "somewhat."

Only six percent of the poll-takers maintained that procrastination affected their happiness "not at all"--whether because they never put anything off or because putting things off has a positive effect on their felicity, we can't know. A few brave souls out there, like the Beloit Students for a Higher Procrastination, admit to actually enjoying the act, but most experts on the subject make it clear that procrastination is no laughing matter.

"Procrastination is not a trivial problem," writes William J. Knaus, Ed.D, in his essay "Overcoming Procrastination: A New Look." "At the milder end of the scale, procrastination mirrors a capricious way of being that appears at different times amidst acts of timely accomplishment. At the extreme, you might feel caught in a procrastination rut, spinning your wheels, going nowhere fast."

What is procrastination?

According to Dr. Knaus, it is "a decision to delay," that may provide "temporary relief because of the whimsical belief that someday something will be done." (I want to weep when I read that. The whimsical belief that someday something will be done is one of the most poignant descriptions of the human condition I have ever run across.)

Others maintain that procrastination is a symptom, not the disease. According to an article in the Wellness Matters Newsletter, procrastinators may be depressed persons who "have low energy and hold negative thoughts about their ability to get things done." Or they may be perfectionists who put off completing tasks for fear that they won't perform up their own or others' high standards.

A lot of experts agree that procrastination is a kind of vicious cycle: the more you do it, the more you do it. Feeling guilty about one's procrastination habits apparently only makes things worse. People periodically "fertilize a procrastination pattern through guilt," writes Dr. Knaus. A helpful tract from the University of Guelph concludes that ultimately breaking this cycle requires understanding why you procrastinate instead of berating yourself for your lack of self-discipline.

Why do we do it?

Maybe it's because we're depressed perfectionists or because we're, as Professor Knaus so poetically puts it, "complex, inventive creatures who do not always act in our enlightened self-interest." Maybe it really is due to the five cognitive distortions noted by Ferrari et al. in Procrastination and Task Avoidance, (Plenum Press 1995).

I think we do it because it works.

Procrastination is the time management tool of last resort in a 24/7 society. It is the Just-In-Time manufacturing strategy of the modern subconscious. It is the overextended brain's autonomic system for redistribution of priorites.

For example

It is 3:00 on a weekday afternoon, one week prior to my deadline for the jugglezine essay on procrastination. I am staring at a blank computer screen when my six-year-old son comes into my office carrying his stuffed Pikachu and a catalog offering for sale, among other amazing things, a bed for said Pikachu.

Two hours later, Eliot is happily tucking his little yellow buddy into a cozy tatami mat with matching pillow and duvet. I am suffused with a contentment that only comes to a mother who has finally exercised her capacity for hand-stitching small items for the beloved of her beloved. The essay has been designated "for tomorrow."

If, as Parkinson's Law says, work expands to fill the time available for its completion, perhaps procrastination is simply a method of deflating work to its appropriate size, in order to make room in our lives for other important things.

In their book, Time for Life, John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey cite several studies that suggest there is little or no relationship between time spent and output achieved. More time studying does not translate into better grades; more time spent on housework does not equal a cleaner house. More time spent writing an essay does not assure increased reader enjoyment.

"The time is out of joint," says Hamlet, literature's greatest procrastinator, and so it is. Even as we move into the New Economy, where stock prices have little relationship to earnings and time expended has little relationship to quality of product, we retain vestiges of industrial days when time was still a relevant measure of human productivity. To prove our worth to our friends and our employers, we must appear to be constantly busy, to have no time.

There will be time for life, say Robinson and Godbey, when we begin to "think about justifying our lives less in terms of what other people want us to do and think and more in terms of what we want and need to do to justify our lives to ourselves."

In the meantime, there's procrastination.

Writer DEBRA WIERENGA procrastinates whenever she gets the chance.