Why I taught myself to procrastinate
What I discovered was that in every creative project there are moments that require thinking more laterally and, yes, more slowly
Normally, I would have finished this column weeks ago. But I kept putting it off because my New Year’s resolution is to procrastinate more. I guess I owe you an explanation. Sooner or later. We think of procrastination as a curse. More than 80 per cent of college students are plagued by procrastination, requiring epic all-nighters to finish papers and prepare for tests. Roughly 20 per cent of adults report being chronic procrastinators. We can only guess how much higher the estimate would be if more of them got around to filling out the survey.
But while procrastination is a vice for productivity, I’ve learnt — against my natural inclinations — that it’s a virtue for creativity.
For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In graduate school I submitted my dissertation two years in advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my thesis four months before the due date. My roommates joked that I had a productive form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Psychologists have coined a term for my condition: pre-crastination.
Pre-crastination is the urge to start a task immediately and finish it as soon as possible. If you’re a serious pre-crastinator, progress is like oxygen and postponement is agony. When a flurry of emails land in your inbox and you don’t answer them instantly, you feel as if your life is spinning out of control. When you have a speech to give next month, each day you don’t work on it brings a creeping sense of emptiness, like a dementor is sucking the joy from the air around you (look it up — now!).
But procrastinators, as writer Tim Urban describes it on the blog Wait But Why, are at the mercy of an Instant Gratification Monkey who inhabits their brains, constantly asking questions like “Why would we ever use a computer for work when the internet is sitting right there waiting to be played with?”
If you’re a procrastinator, overcoming that monkey can require Herculean amounts of willpower. But a pre-crastinator may need equal willpower to not work.
A few years ago, though, one of my most creative students, Jihae Shin, questioned my expeditious habits. She told me her most original ideas came to her after she procrastinated. I challenged her to prove it. She got access to a couple of companies, surveyed people on how often they procrastinated, and asked their supervisors to rate their creativity. Procrastinators earned significantly higher creativity scores than pre-crastinators like me.
I wasn’t convinced. So Jihae, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin, designed some experiments. She asked people to come up with new business ideas. Some were randomly assigned to start right away. Others were given five minutes to first play Minesweeper or Solitaire. Everyone submitted their ideas, and independent raters rated how original they were. The procrastinators’ ideas were 28 per cent more creative.
So what if creativity happens not in spite of procrastination, but because of it? I decided to give it a try. The good news is that I am no stranger to self-discipline. So I woke up one morning and wrote a to-do list for procrastinating more.
My first step was to delay creative tasks, starting with this article. I resisted the temptation to sit down and start typing, and instead waited. While procrastinating (i.e., thinking), I remembered an article I had read months earlier on pre-crastination. It dawned on me that I could use my own experiences as a pre-crastinator to set the stage for readers.
Next, I drew some inspiration from George Costanza on Seinfeld, who made it a habit to quit on a high note. When I started writing a sentence that felt good, I stopped in the middle of it and walked away. When I returned to writing later that day, I was able to pick up where I had left the trail of thought.
Once I did finish a draft, I put it away for three weeks. When I came back to it, I had enough distance to wonder, “What kind of idiot wrote this garbage?” and rewrote most of it. To my surprise, I had some fresh material at my disposal. What I discovered was that in every creative project, there are moments that require thinking more laterally and, yes, more slowly.
Of course, procrastination can go too far. Jihae randomly assigned a third group of people to wait until the last minute to begin their project. They weren’t as creative either. They had to rush to implement the easiest idea instead of working out a novel one.
To curb that kind of destructive procrastination, science offers some useful guidance. First, imagine yourself failing spectacularly, and the ensuing frenzy of anxiety may jumpstart your engine. Second, lower your standards for what counts as progress, and you will be less paralysed by perfectionism.
But if you’re a procrastinator, next time you’re wallowing in the dark playground of guilt and self-hatred over your failure to start a task, remember that the right kind of procrastination might make you more creative. And if you’re a pre-crastinator like me, it may be worth mastering the discipline of forcing yourself to procrastinate. You can’t be afraid of leaving your work un...
Adam Grant is a professor of management and psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World.
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