Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1 July 1742 – 24 February 1799) was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile.
And a procrastinator.
Lichtenberg has lent his name to an entire creative strategy – Lichtenbergianism.
Lichtenberg was an amazing intellect. Despite his world-class procrastinating, Lichtenberg accomplished a lot.
Lichtenberg, the youngest of 17(!) children, was born in Ober-Ramstadt near Darmstadt, Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt, in what his now Germany.
His father was a pastor, who unusually for the time, possessed some scientific knowledge. Young Georg Christoph was educated at home until he was 10. His intelligence was apparently apparent at an early age.
Being the youngest of 17, his family didn’t have the money to advance his education. His mother applied to the local nobleman, Ludwig VIII, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, who granted a scholarship in 1763 for Georg Christoph to attend the University of Göttingen.
Lichtenberg became a professor of physics. Among other things, he was one of the first to introduce Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod to Germany, installing the devices in his house and garden sheds.
He was friends with Goethe and Kant. In 1784, Alessandro Volta visited Göttingen to see him and his experiments. Mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss sat in on his lectures.
Lichtenberg visited England, became an Anglophile, and was received by George III and Queen Charlotte. He was elected a member of Royal Society. He wrote satires and essentially invented scrapbooking.
But he also liked to put things off.
From Wikipedia:
Lichtenberg was prone to procrastination. He failed to launch the first hydrogen balloon. He always dreamed of writing a novel à la Fielding's Tom Jones, but never finished more than a few pages.
Which brings us to the concept of Lichtenbergianism.
The creator of Lichtenbergianism is Dale Lyles, a retired educator who has also been an artistic director of a theater company, a choir director, a website designer, composer, painter, writer, actor and dancer.
Lyles, per his Mastodon profile, defines Lichtenbergianism thusly: Lichtenbergianism is the theory that everyone is creative; all you have to do is put it off.
Lyles maintains the website https://www.lichtenbergianism.com
and is author of the book Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, which is available from Amazon and from independent booksellers.
In 2022 Lyles published A Young Person’s Guide to Lichtenbergianism, which he is offering as a pdf download. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/576bec6dd482e9c2ed113cfa/t/63d91091ceec201c56b0195d/1675169947289/Young+Person%27s+Guide+ARC.pdf
The Nine Precepts Of Lichtenbergianism
Lyles has set forth the nine precepts of Lichtenbergianism:
1. Task Avoidance: Obviously. Cras melior est. (Tomorrow is better)
2. Abortive Attempts: Give yourself permission to create crap. Lots of crap.
3. Successive Approximation: Give yourself permission to change what you’ve done.
4. Waste Books: Create a system to record your ideas willy-nilly. Sort them out later.
5. Ritual: Find ways to make your work flow.
6. Steal from the Best: Pay attention to the past, learn from it, then run with it.
7. Gestalt: Look at your work and see what’s there and what’s not there, what needs to be there and what needs to be not there.
8. Audience: Have someone in mind.
9. Abandonment: Give up.
WHY LICTENBERGIANISM?
Despite his accomplishments, Lichtenberg is a relatively obscure historical figure.
So how did Lyles come across Lichtenberg and get the inspiration to create Lichtenbergianism?
The answer involves some of the best things in life -- friends, a fire pit, drinking, a discussion of the nature of art and a search of the all-knowing oracle that is Wikipedia.
Lyles explains in his book, the following except he was kind enough to provide to me (I’m procrastinating buying the book of course, but I’ll get around it):
In late 2007, I sent out an email to a collection of friends noting that the Winter Solstice fell on a Saturday and would anyone like to join me around the fire pit for an evening of drinking, conviviality, and earnest discussion on the nature of art? Since the solstice was the weekend before Christmas, I was surprised when all six men accepted my invitation.
Most of us knew each other through my time at the Newnan Community Theatre Company, where I had been the artistic director for 20+ years. All of us were creative in ways other than theatre — composers, photographers, writers, musicians — and moreover were creative in our careers as well — educators for the most part, but also a reporter, a computer programmer, even a clown.
All of us were at a point in our personal and creative lives where we wanted to sit around a fire and talk about the nature of art with someone similarly inclined. In the intervening weeks, discussion on my blog ebbed and flowed until one day I posted a (very negative) review of the Bavarian State Opera’s production of Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland.
Discussion in comments became vigorous as we defended/trashed the “old forms” like opera and debated whether they were still viable. Good times.
After a particularly vibrant exchange, Turff10 intoned, “To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation,” and credited the aphorism to one Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.
I headed over to Wikipedia to find out who this Lichtenberg chap was and discovered someone after our own hearts: an innovative thinker who puttered around in many fields; a physicist and an educator; an Anglophile, who on a trip to England once visited the widow of the great typographer Baskerville to discuss buying the designer’s elegant typefaces.
And then... there was this sentence:
Lichtenberg was prone to procrastination. He failed to launch the first ever hydrogen balloon, and although he always dreamed of writing a novel à la Fielding’s Tom Jones, he never finished more than a few pages. He died at the age of 56, after a short illness.
“He never finished more than a few pages.” Here, surely, was our patron saint. I teasingly assigned everyone the task of writing the first chapter in a “Tom Jones-like novel,” and we were off. Within a week, had a charter, officers, and an agenda for the inaugural meeting.
Our motto: Cras melior est. Tomorrow is better.
Lichtenbergianism differs from other strategies for dealing with procrastination.
Lichtenbergianism advocates recognizing the scourge of procrastination and using it as a means of creative inspirations.
There is actually research that backs up the idea that “moderate” procrastination may lead to greater productivity.
A study published in 2021 titled When Putting Work Off Pays Off: The Curvilinear Relationship between Procrastination and Creativity, American management professors Jihae Shin and Adam Grant found that ‘time-wasting’ activities may offer the optimal level of distraction for greater creativity. The key being using distraction in moderation. https://journals.aom.org/doi/full/10.5465/amj.2018.1471
“Moderate procrastination can foster creativity when employees have the intrinsic motivation and opportunity to generate new ideas,” Shin and Grant wrote in their study published by the Academy of Management.
From the abstract for When Putting Work Off Pays Off:
“In two experiments in the United States, we tempted participants to engage in varying degrees of procrastination by making different numbers of funny YouTube videos easily accessible while they were supposed to be solving business problems. Participants generated more creative ideas in the moderate rather than low or high procrastination conditions. This curvilinear effect was partially mediated by problem restructuring and the activation of new knowledge. We constructively replicated and extended the curvilinear effect in a field study with Korean employees: procrastination predicted lower task efficiency but had an inverted-U-shaped relationship with creativity. Employees who procrastinated moderately received higher creativity ratings from their supervisors than employees who procrastinated more or less, provided that intrinsic motivation or creative requirement was high.”
Aside from the The Lichtenbergian Society, there is, or was, The Procrastinators' Club of America. Founded in 1956 as a joke by Philadelphia-based advertising executive Les Morton “Les” Waas. Waas incorporated the club in 1966. The club embarked on a number of satirical displays of procrastination such an anti-war demonstration, against the War of 1812 – in 1966.
A website for the club, https://procrastinators.org/, has not had a new post since 2016. A Facebook page named for the club appears to be run by a single individual.
Waas, who was prolific composer of advertising jingles, died in 2016 at age 94.
PROCRASTINATION SCIENCE
While Lyles’ Lichtenbergian Society promotes a creative approach to procrastination, but the very human desire to put things off is also the subject of scientific research.
There is actually a large body of academic research on procrastination.
Much of this research in some way deals with studying why people procrastinate and helping chronic procrastinators overcome what some academics consider a kind of mental disorder.
Procrastination is considered a negative behavior because it hinders productivity, is associated with depression, low self-esteem, guilt, and feelings of inadequacy.
It’s actually possible to get a PhD in procrastination. Yes, really.
The Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary, PhD Program in human resources and organizational dynamics, where graduate students can work with Piers Steel, who, according to his bio on the website https://procrastinus.com, “likes to think he is among the world’s foremost researchers and speakers on the science of motivation and procrastination.”
It is apparently mandatory that procrastination experts write at least one book on the subject, preferably one that combines self-help with scientific research. To this end, Steel wrote The Procrastination Equation, How To Stop Putting Things Off And Start Getting Things Done, published in 2012. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/procrastination-equation-piers-steel/1101371938
Other leading procrastination experts include Fuschia Sirois, professor of social and health psychology at the University of Durham, UK, and Timothy A. Pychyl, owner of the Procrastination Research Group who recently retired as an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
Sirois is author of Procrastination What It Is, Why It's a Problem, and What You Can Do About It, https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/procrastination
published in 2022 by the American Psychological Association. Pychyl is the author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide to Strategies for Change, published in 2013 by TarcherPerigee.
https://www.amazon.com/Solving-Procrastination-Puzzle-Concise-Strategies/dp/0399168125
Between them, Pychyl, Sirois and Steel have also published numerous articles and papers about procrastination and have conducted extensive research on the subject. They have been widely quoted in the popular media talking about procrastination and how individuals can deal with it.
FAMOUS PROCRASTINATORS
A staple of articles about procrastination are lists of famous people who are or were procrastinators.
These lists often seem to be in no particular order or ranking, so here is compendium of five famous writers known for procrastination, in alphabetical order:
Douglas Adams – Author Douglas Adams, who wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, spent a decade writing the novel The Salmon of Doubt. The book was incomplete when he died in 2001.
“I love deadlines,” Adams once said. “I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”
“When struggling to finish So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, Adams’ editor locked him in a hotel suite for three weeks to ensure that the writer had nowhere to hide, and no chance to ignore his work, according to the website http://screwworkbreakfree.com .“During the three weeks he had food and drink sent directly to him and, eventually, managed to finish the book.”
Margaret Atwood – Atwood put off writing her most famous work, The Handmaid’s Tale, for three years. Atwood has described herself as a “world class procrastinator.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poet Coleridge found it difficult to concentrate on writing and often produced fragmentary pieces of poems. His most famous work, Kubla Khan is incomplete. The poem has been subtitled "A Vision in a Dream" and "A Fragment."
Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan – Anglo-Irish playwright Sheridan finished writing the final act of his 1777 play The School for Scandal on opening night on 8 May 1777 while it was being performed on at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Nonetheless, it is considered one of the greatest comedies of manners in English.
Hunter S. Thompson – Author of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, gonzo journalist Thompson was famous for pushing deadlines to, and sometimes past, their limits. He said that there must be a deadline for him to sit and write productivity. “I couldn’t imagine, and I don’t say this with any pride, but I really couldn’t imagine writing without a desperate deadline.”
“I’m really an adrenaline junkie; I never get anything done without the pressure of some impossible deadline” he says in the book Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson.
Another famous Thompson quote about procrastination: “A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”
Thanks for posting this. I'll read it over the weekend.
A set-up with no punch line?!?!?