I have a serious problem with procrastination. Its something we often joke about but sometimes it becomes a really big issue. It stops me from achieving my potential, effects my productivity and generally makes me anxious and miserable. I am involved in two businesses and studying for a PhD, I am really not in a position where I can afford to have something messing with my productivity!

Fortunately I am quite good at the whole ‘metacognition’ thing, and I generally understand more than most about what is going on in the chaos that passes for my mind. This is no exception. Once I get started on a task I generally enjoy doing it and always (so far) produce work of an acceptable standard and yet I will put a job off again and again until the workload has piled up and I don’t know where to start. Why? because I am worried that I actually cannot do it; that what I produce will not be good enough and that people will therefore realise that I have been pulling off an elaborate confidence trick and do not actually have a clue what I am doing. All evidence to date suggests that this is not, in fact, the case – and yet I cannot shake the demon. While I am aware that it is this fear of failure that is the root cause of the problem, I have never really understood where that fear came from. I think I may be getting an inkling.

As part of my PhD, I work as a TA for an undergraduate course and so have recently found myself marking undergraduate essays for the first time. This was a very interesting experience which I thoroughly enjoyed (once I got over the ‘they’re letting me mark undergrad essays! Are they mad?’ related panic). Reading the essays got me wondering about how closely they related to what I was producing at that stage in my career. Now I do have slightly obsessive tendencies, meaning that I actually still have all the notes, files and essays relating to my undergraduate career around 23 years ago. (My partner, having glanced at the pages and pages of neat, uniform hand writing has declared them to be ‘the product of of a diseased mind’). So, one evening last week, I went and got my first year folder and had a look at some of my earliest offerings.

I am not going to make any comment on the essays I marked (which would be unprofessional) or on the essays I wrote (which would be indulgent) but I do want to make a comment on the feedback in both cases. The first essay of mine that I looked at was about 5,000 words long (I have always had a tendency to go on a bit) and all handwritten with virtually no crossings out. I imagine I worked on it for days and viewed it not only as an academic offering but as a thing of aesthetic beauty in and of itself. There was a lot of emotional investment as well as the time taken and quite a lot of ‘myself’ went into the work. A few things about it made me smile, a few ‘facts’ have since been superseded (I confidently asserted, for example, that Tut-Ankh-Amun had been murdered) but it was certainly not as cringe-worthy as I had expected. The feedback I received consisted of two sentences, mostly about my spelling (still not brilliant but thankfully less of an issue in the Age of Word-Processing) and all highly critical. The same pattern was repeated on most of the essays I looked at. Not a single positive comment could I find. All of the criticism was constructive and no-doubt helpful, but all of it negative.

Now, I eventually left university with a 2-1 so I know it was not disastrous. When I stopped and thought about it, there was, of course, an unspoken assumption of a certain, underlying standard since I had been accepted into one of the top universities for my subject in the first place, but, and this is the crucial thing, that assumption remained unspoken. Following a hunch I went back and looked ay my A level work (yes, I know). Once again, the majority of feedback was brief and critical (if a little more witty in the case of my RE teacher- “Your spelling of Juddah makes me shudder…be shrewder, spell it Judah”. In fairness, Judah is a word I now consistently spell correctly when I need to write it…which is very rarely!) It occurred to me in a flash of brilliance (sort of) that despite some of the jobs I have, as a senior examiner writing GCSE papers, as a task force member and delegate on the Religious Education Council and as an AHRC funded PhD candidate, all of which lead me to believe that others think I am in fact half way competent, no authority figure had ever said anything like “Eh-up…you’re pretty damn good at this!”

Does this matter? Yes I think it does. Shouldn’t I have known this already?-no, I don’t think I should. The message I had, from very early on, was about how much better I could do and this, I think, has been problematic for me. Something, buried quite deep in my head, just doesn’t think I’m very good and tries to save me the embarrassment of proving it. Does this mean we shouldn’t give constructive feedback? Of course not! When I went to look at the feedback I had had on my MA essays (submitted some 15 years later) it was a very different story. There was a full page of feedback on each one, most of which was positive with some suggestions for improvement. the whole feel was completely different. This pattern was repeated in the forms I had to attach to the essays I marked. Specific, targeted feedback, a significant amount of space for comments and an expectation that I would comment on the good as well as the ‘improvable’. While I am by no means a fan of the idea that all changes in education over the last 20 years have been good, this is one area where I think we have got it spectacularly right. The feel of the feedback is supportive and does not leave all of the good features as ‘understood’. Hopefully this means that the new generation of students will have a realistic idea of their abilities, will be able to take pride in their achievements and will not be terrified to pick up a pen (or turn on a computer) in case whatever they produce falls short of the ‘spectacular perfection’ that I expect of myself.