Seminar rooms, well-meaning colleagues and the internet are just bursting to share with you their ideas on how to beat procrastination. But why would you want to do that? Procrastination has reportedly been the secret productivity weapon of some of the most creative people in history.
As Agatha Christie noted: "I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness."
The pro-procrastination mob will also quote Leonardo and Einstein and Steve Jobs at you as examples of people who achieved by not getting around to things.
So it's important to get one thing clear up front: You are not Leonardo or Einstein or Steve Jobs. You are not even Agatha Christie. Your enthusiastic dilly dallying will not lead to you paint the Mona Lisa, solve the mysteries of the universe or produce the next iPhone.
That is why procrastination inspires so many ideas for how to beat it. The barrage of academic articles examining the psychology and mechanics of the phenomenon all start from the assumption that procrastinating is a problem to be solved, before going on to offer up a litany of tough-love tactics.
Well, you won't find any of that here, where we take the view that procrastination is a solution waiting to be met. Because, even though you won't be able to knock off a Last Supper at the weekend, you can still make procrastination work for you in wonderful ways.
One of the leading advocates of putting things off is Frank Partnoy, author of Wait: The Art and Science of Delay.
"I had been interested for a long time in procrastination and how people manage delay and defer decisions," explains Partnoy, whose day job is professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley.
"I heard this story about Lehman Brothers, who in 2005 took their top executives on a decision-making course. They had Malcolm Gladwell give a keynote lecture."
Gladwell had written an influential book, Blink, about how the best decisions are made instantly.
"They went through this exercise and then went back to their HQ and made the worst decisions in the history of finance." Three years later the bank collapsed.
Further investigation showed Partnoy that many important decisions are not made until the last possible moment – no matter the time frame in which they occur. The ace tennis player decides a move at the last millisecond. "I have a lot of friends who are ER doctors," says Partnoy. "I asked them: if you have a minute to act in, what do you do? They said they wait 59 seconds, then react."
Partnoy encourages people to resist the impulsive tide of the modern world. "You have people instantly reacting to TikTok, and my students say no one reads books, and this article will probably be too long for people to read all the way through. I want to help people resist the temptation to immediately react and just take a step back."
He proposes a two-step process. First work out the "time world" for an action: seconds for the tennis player, a minute for the ER doctor, weeks for the student with an assignment. "The second step is waiting till the last possible moment, but you can't wait too long. If you have a 5pm deadline for a job and you think it will take an hour, you can't start it at five past four, because you will miss your deadline."
This sort of procrastinating can save a lot of time. "I'm more effective if I concentrate my preparation for a class until right at the end, so it is fresh. If I have a deadline of July 1 and the task will take two weeks, I will put chunks of time for it in my calendar. Then I won't even think about it consciously until then." Subconsciously, however, his mind will be working away at the topic while he is thinking about other things.
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy John Perry, of Stanford University, won an IgNobel Prize for his work on procrastination in 2011. The award has been given annually since 1991 to "honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think". He won his for an essay called How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done, and he has been in no hurry to change his views since then. Perry is an advocate of "structured procrastination".
He describes the discovery: "One day I had a lot of stuff to do – dissertations to read, some articles to vet, memos and so forth. Instead, I was doing crossword puzzles. I got mad at myself, and then I thought: Wait a minute – everyone at the university thinks I get a lot done and I do get a lot done. But I get it done by not doing what I'm supposed to do. Then at the last minute, I do it."
In other words, while not doing the thing he is supposed to do, he does a lot of other things. Then, at the last minute, he does the original thing as well.
It's a useful idea but needs to be handled with care. "The worst thing is not to accept any task except the most important ones, in which case you will probably get nothing done and be fired. I'm not giving a course on how to become a procrastinator. I'm saying if you think of it this way, you won't feel so guilty and you'll get more done."
Perry accepts that despite his enthusiasm for procrastination, he is highly goal-oriented: "I have a lot of goals. But as a philosopher, you think: are they really worthwhile? And then you think: is it really worthwhile to sit and think about whether my goals are worthwhile? And by then it is lunchtime."
Thomas Ormerod, who is head of the psychology school at the University of Sussex, calls it incubation. "Incubation is the idea that things are cooking," says Ormerod. "It is not stalling."
He says many tasks benefit from incubation. "If you are trying to solve a problem and get stuck, there is a benefit in putting it to one side, doing something else and then coming back to it. Your brain is unconsciously processing relevant information while thinking about something else."
There are different kinds of processing depending on the kind of problem. You might not be procrastinating as such but "it might be that you are restructuring ideas so that you can see something from a different viewpoint, and come at it from a different way".
His research showed "sleeping on it" is a form of procrastination that also works in a variety of ways. "A period of sleep didn't help solve relatively easy problems, but helped solve really difficult ones. So, if it is really difficult, sleep on it; if it's easy, just put it to one side and come back to it."
One specific example of incubation at work that Ormerod discovered involved exam technique. Most students faced with a three-question, three-hour exam did the easiest question first, the next easiest next and ran out of time to finish the last one. " I say do a plan of all three first – while they are working on the first question, the other two are being incubated "
Surrendering yourself to delay is all a bit scary for those who are focused on getting the job done. But the implications could go beyond our daily work grind to the likes of climate change, where we might have done the right thing by not doing anything – so far."
"There is something to be said for thinking through what the optimal amount of time is for global warming," says Partnoy. "We shouldn't be making our climate change decisions within the political cycle. We should have a 10-year plan."
Creative corner
Mike Hutcheson
From advertising to academia, Mike Hutcheson has built a career out of not doing anything in a hurry. Hutcheson, who is Adjunct Professor – Student Success at AUT, knows that time is precious, and deadlines need to be kept in their place.
"There are things I think I want to do, and I feel a deadline because mortality is looming large in my life. But then I think – no, I can trust my own judgment if my procrastinator voice is telling me the time is not right. We tend to do the things that are urgent rather than important. When we rush, the result is half-baked. Einstein said if he had an hour to save the world he would spend 55 minutes working out the problem and just five on the solution."
Hutcheson says we should fight the urge not to procrastinate: "Your subconscious knows if something is not quite cooked yet. When it's ready to come it just comes."
Harry Lyon
Musicians are world-beating procrastinators. Depending on whose figures you accept, Axl Rose took either 12 or 15 years to complete Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy album.
Although not that extreme, Harry Lyon knows the feeling. "My worst procrastinating is about finishing songs," says the Hello Sailor bass player. "It's not like when we were younger in a working band and there was the expectation to get a new album out. I only have to do it because I want to. And it's not that I don't want to, but I don't have to, so that's the problem."
This isn't exactly unprecedented. Under a Surrey Crescent Moon, the band's last album featuring original members Graham Brazier and Dave McArtney, who died in 2015 and 2013 respectively, included songs that had been floating around unfinished since Hello Sailor's formation nearly 40 years before.
The Covid effect
The origin of the term procrastibaking - whipping up something delicious rather than doing your proper work – is unclear. But there's no doubt the pandemic has raised it to an art form. Opinion is divided on whether lockdown encouraged or deterred procrastination.
For many, it provided a perfect – and wholly legitimate - excuse not to do things
"I think Covid has done the world a favour by slowing it down," says Mike Hutcheson, whose productivity paradoxically went up in that time. "I got through a lot more stuff. I wrote a forthcoming book called Sort Your Shit Out and had the time to do it."
Ormerod says the pandemic hindered some tasks involving teamwork: "If you were expected to produce an artefact or piece of writing and it was a seriously large thing you would normally do with others, then I suspect the pandemic will have had a big negative effect because you can use the absence of others as an excuse."
On the other hand: "With Zoom, people's tolerance for the procrastination of others, as characterised by lateness, has gone down. If someone is five minutes late, you are asking where they are. But if we were meeting in my office, it would be 15 minutes before I started doing that. Because we were communicating through a medium where we know we have instant access, our tolerance has gone down. So there have been effects but they have been quite subtle."
John Perry also sees two sides to the Covid story: "As a practical dilemma that will have to work itself out in the next year. A lot of small companies realised employees were getting a lot done working out of home without the commute and the obnoxious colleagues. Others were saying " 'They're not here, where I can beat on their heads, so nothing happens.' "
