The holiday paradox: why time dawdles by the hour but zooms by the day

July 30, 2026 — 4:00pm

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Seat-belt clicked, I speed-read a book on procrastination, five pages to go before we land in Melbourne. Leonardo da Vinci was a great procrastinator, apparently, the fruit of being a multitasking perfectionist. Charles Darwin bred barnacles in his greenhouse for a decade rather than tell the world about natural selection.

Rife with such examples, Soon by Andrew Santella (HarperCollins 2018) is subtitled An Overdue History of Procrastination. I bought the book on a whim in Fremantle, killing time on holiday. Time has been an obsession lately, why it speeds or crawls or contorts into pretzels.

Even as we land, I see my phone jump forward two hours, the surrealism of jet travel, as if clock numbers are squiggles born of make-believe. Maria Popova, the US-Bulgarian essayist, has also........

© The Sydney Morning Herald