You Didn't Forget. You Were Paralyzed by Shamecrastination.
You Didn't Forget. You Were Paralyzed by Shamecrastination.
Someone who appears careless or disorganized might actually be suffering from shamecrastination (shame + procrastination). Part 1/3
You’re having a conversation over text, email, or DM. Something comes up in real life, forcing you to pause mid-conversation to stop your dog/kid/subordinate from sticking another tongue/fork/career in an electrical socket. After that, you run off to catch a pre-existing commitment.
A week goes by, and you’re not sure how to pick up the conversation where you left off. You’ve never openly discussed communication preferences with your interlocutor; do they expect timely responses? Did you offend them with your silence? Should you apologize for the late response? But wait…apologizing would only draw attention to the fact that you left them hanging!
A month goes by. You feel a pang of guilt whenever you see the other person’s unanswered message loitering in your inbox. A sense of foreboding hangs over you like a dark cloud. You procrastinate by accomplishing another task with lower uncertainty and clearer benefits.
Seven months fly by, and you feel trapped. You conclude that the only solution is to enter the Witness Protection Program, get abducted by aliens, or die.
What is Shamecrastination?
Welcome to the Taboo Tunnels, which contain all the things left unsaid. Some topics (e.g. incest, eugenics, a coworker’s sexy outfit) are true taboos – we can’t talk about them without social backlash. Shamecrastination falls into a different category: it’s something we can’t talk about simply because we lack the means to express ourselves.
Note: Anthropologists and therapists consider guilt and shame to be completely different concepts. However, this two-part essay treats guilt and shame so shallowly that they’re functionally identical. Since we’re frolicking in the inflatable kiddie pool of human emotions, we’ll use the two terms interchangeably.
Shamecrastination is what happens when we do something wrong (or neglect to do something right) and the discomfort causes us to procrastinate in fixing the problem we created. We, the authors of Adventures in Leadership Land, are atrocious shamecrastinators. We drop Reddit conversations in the middle and pick them back up months later. One of our readers reached out to us last November and we shamecrastinated until March before responding.
This would never happen face-to-face, so why does shamecrastination appear in asynchronous conversations? More curious still – we genuinely enjoy these conversations and don’t intend to sabotage them, but our behavior does just that. What gives?
Boiling the Frog in a Pot of Hot Shame
To get to the roots of shamecrastination, let’s dissect some common professional excuses jargon:
It slipped through the cracks.
That fell off my radar.
I dropped the ball.
Sometimes, they simply mean “I forgot” or “I was careless.” Full stop. That’s excusable as long as the slippery task wasn’t mission-critical. We all have a limited supply of time, scruples, and damns, and some days we run out of damns to give before we satisfy our scruples.
Time management is all about giving a damn to the right things and delegating/eliminating the rest by following the Eisenhower Matrix, right? Yes…except that time management is a logical endeavor, while procrastination is an emotional-regulation problem. Theory: 0 vs. Practice: 1
Generally, shamecrastination only arises in certain conditions:
The shamecrastinator lacks the authority/staffing to delegate tasks.
The work environment is highly variable, with 20% of the tasks taking up 80% of the time (Pareto Principle).
Many white collar-jobs that require critical thinking and professional judgment fall into this category.
Neglecting one of the 80% tasks that take up 20% of the time doesn’t lead to immediate consequences. Bad things will come…sometime in the indefinite future. Maybe.
Documentation for CYA – Covering Your Ass(ets) – is a great example. Every time you fail to CYA, you purchase one ticket to the anti-lottery of failure. You can buy many tickets, yet never “win” the anti-lottery.
Recall the old story about the frog in the pot: a frog placed in tepid water will (supposedly) perish if the water is heated to a boil slowly enough.
Shamecrastination feels like being slowly boiled alive in a steaming pot of shame. Does this situation sound familiar to you?
You know you should’ve put a coversheet on your TPS report and filed it two months ago. Should you update your boss about your irresolution? She got angry at you when you last mentioned the topic three weeks ago. You can feel hot blood rushing to your face, leaving a knot of icy dread in your stomach at the thought of repeating that experience.
No, why bother? You agreed at your last meeting that the assignment handed down by the Senior VP is the highest priority. Besides, you didn’t get to where you are today by diligently putting coversheets on TPS reports; you were promoted because you provided definite, measurable value to Company McCorporateface, Inc.
The cycle of shame/guilt → rationalization/excuses → procrastination repeats many times until it becomes ingrained as a habit.
Cause of Negligence: Caring Too Little or Caring Too Much?
In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Taleb recounts the story of a Las Vegas casino that spent millions of dollars on risk management, including a high-tech surveillance system on the casino floor. Ironically, one of the largest losses the casino ever incurred had nothing to do with cheaters and card counters. Here’s an excerpt:
Casinos must file a special form with the Internal Revenue Service documenting a gambler’s profit if it exceeds a given amount. The employee who was supposed to mail the forms hid them, instead, for completely unexplainable reasons, in boxes under his desk. This went on for years without anyone noticing that something was wrong […] Tax violations (and negligence) being serious offences, the casino faced the near loss of a gambling license or the onerous financial costs of a suspension. Clearly they ended up paying a monstrous fine (an undisclosed amount), which was the luckiest way out of the problem.
What was your knee-jerk reaction to the employee who hid the tax forms under his desk? If you’re like us, it was something in the vicinity of “what an idiot!” Our impulse is to jump to the conclusion that he’s a lazy lout. An inept imbecile. A forgetful fool. Given the magnitude of his folly, we may be right.
But what if our initial impression is wrong?1 What if the guy didn’t hide the tax forms because he was stupid, careless, or malicious, but because he was paralyzed by shamecrastination? What if he was late with the first tax filing and the feeling of shame inhibited him from doing the right thing? What if his boss was volatile, and the fear of a temper tantrum conspired with the feelings of shame to prevent action? The employee could’ve admitted his mistake and been verbally abused and fired on the spot, or he could’ve covered up the whole mess and been fired years later.
None of this is to say that shamecrastination is excusable; the impact of negligence isn’t reduced by the reasons that led to it. Instead, we’re highlighting that shamecrastination appears identical to amnesia and carelessness, but it afflicts conscientious people who care too much. That is, shamecrastinators care so much about the wrong things that their shame/guilt prevents them from doing the right thing. If a negligent person were truly careless, they would feel absolutely nothing.
Since it isn’t the same as forgetfulness or sloppiness, shamecrastination must be corrected and prevented differently. A conscientious person doesn’t lack scruples; it’s the leader’s job to redirect their attention away from guilt and shame, and back toward doing the right thing. That’s the subject of part 2, which you can read by clicking/poking your screen here.
Ancient Limitations on Modern Expectations
Instant communication, like text and email, is amazing. But this technological marvel has also robbed us of solitude and glued our faces to our phones. How are you supposed to introspect in the Contrarian Caves when there’s pressure to be on-call all the time? How much Cerebrium can you mine from the Secret Grottos if your devices are constantly dinging and buzzing for your attention?
Modern technologies have warped social norms about asynchronous conversations. From deep within the Taboo Tunnels comes a whisper of anxiety: “if I don’t respond quickly, it shows that I don’t value the other person.” We challenge that unspoken belief. It conflates importance with urgency and causes us to misclassify much of our communication into Quadrant I of the Eisenhower Matrix (important, urgent) when it really belongs in Quadrant II (important, not urgent).
Our forefathers had to send messages by courier, chariot, and boat. A message could take weeks to arrive, and the response would take weeks more returning to the initial sender – yet the ancients had no problems maintaining lifelong friendships with correspondents living abroad. They separated importance from urgency because they had no choice. We do - and we choose to follow their example of slow but substantial correspondence.
So if you don’t hear from us immediately, we’re probably slaving away in the Cerebrium mines. Or we’re shamecrastinating.
This is why we personify the courts as Lady Justice, who wields a weighing scale in one hand and a sword in another. The court of public opinion is rarely about justice – it’s more often a masturbatory exercise in self-righteousness.