The power of passion procrastination

I’m writing this at 11:05pm, after a flurry of activity in which Peiying, Gayathrii and I agreed on a name, set up the Substack, created a logo and banner, filled in the About page and wrote the thank-you message that gets sent out to subscribers of this newsletter. There has been a remarkable amount of motivation (and speed!) considering the lateness of the hour and the long days we’ve had.

Such is the power of passion procrastination.

A passion procrastination is like a passion project, except not only are you taking it on when you already have a bunch of other things to do, it looks even more attractive precisely because you already have a bunch of other things to do.

All three of us involved in this newsletter are usually busy AF. We do a lot of writing as part of our daily work, whether it’s newsletters (for example, besides this one, I run two of my own and Mekong Review’s weekly newsletter), notes for students, articles, research papers or academic essays. Writing for work brings its own strings: deadlines, editors, clients, students, parents, relevance, timeliness, urgency, risk. Sometimes a change is needed.

I was pondering this recently when I wrote a blog post about writing for pleasure and for myself. It felt like a beautiful serendipity when, shortly after publishing that post, the opportunity to start—I almost said “work on”, but the whole point is that it’s not work—this newsletter with two good friends popped up. 

We’re super excited. We’re going to work so hard. On our actual jobs. But also on this. Even when it requires binge-watching an unreasonable number of episodes of drama each week. Especially when it requires binge-watching an unreasonable number of episodes of drama each week. We’ll sleep when we’re dead. Or if we get hit by the White Truck of Doom.

The concept of Passion Procrastination is simple. It’s about writing for enjoyment. It’s about fun. It’s about drama. It’s about friendship. It’s about laughs. And most fundamentally, it’s about doing something other than work. This newsletter is Procrastination Made Possible.

As such, we’ve come up with only two very simple rules:

Rule # 1: We won’t adhere to rules very strictly. 

Rule # 2: We won’t ever set deadlines.

(Rule #1 is proven by adhering to Rule #2 strictly.)

Let the fun/chaos begin.