is born in 1987. She studied applied arts, psychoanalysis, and philosophy in Paris. In 2011, she relocated to Berlin, where she spent four years working for various startups. In 2017 she wrote a book about her experience : Welcome to the New World: How I Survived the Coolness of Startups. She's also a graphic novelist and a translator.
Picture : © Chloé Guilhem
Everyone procrastinates, and for good reason: it’s not such a bad thing. In her essay Tame Your Procrastination (in French, 2023), Mathilde Ramadier argues that it can even be a legitimate work process, and a perfectly natural way of doing things.
Interview by Apolline Guillot.
Is procrastination the evil of the century?
Mathilde Ramadier: The term itself is old: it comes from the Latin pro-crastinare, meaning “put off until tomorrow”, “postpone,” and first appeared in French in the 16th century. It was rarely used for a long time, then it became popular over the past fifteen years. Perhaps because, in our productivist logic, we try to name problems in order to better eliminate it. And what an ugly name!
We must get rid of the idea that procrastination only concerns a few black sheep, isolated from a functional majority of people. According to a study by the Odoxa institute in 2019, 85% of us procrastinate chronically. And I think the remaining 15% procrastinated their survey response! Furthermore, procrastination is different from laziness or idleness: often, people who procrastinate don’t do less than others, they just do things differently. We shouldn’t moralise procrastination. We should try to understand it.
Using neuroscience, for example? What happens in the brain of a person who procrastinates?
In 2018, a team of German researchers showed that in procrastinators, the amygdala, which manages both pleasure and anxiety, is larger. They also note that the connection between the amygdala and the cingulate cortex, the seat of reasoning, is weaker in people who procrastinate. There is less activity between the two areas: consequently, the cortex has more difficulty sorting between the actions to be carried out and those which must be cancelled.
‘Procrastination is a psychological conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle’
But biology doesn’t explain everything…
Procrastination is a psychological conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. For Freud, the tension between these two principles is precisely what keeps us alive. It’s one of the most fundamental interactions in our psychological life – and this is why procrastination affects everyone, regardless of age or social category.
What does he mean by that?
In a 1911 article, Freud explains that the pleasure principle is intended to provide direct access to pleasure – infants, for example, achieve this when they’re breast-feeding. This principle governs the evolution of psychic processes which tend to maintain a pleasant existence. When we pr
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