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How Procrastination Can Be Good For You (nytimes.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Over 80 percent of college students are plagued by procrastination, requiring epic all-nighters to finish papers and prepare for tests. Roughly 20 percent of adults report being chronic procrastinators. But Adam Grant writes in the NY Times that while we think of procrastination as a curse for productivity, procrastination is really a virtue for creativity. According to Grant, our first ideas are usually our most conventional -- but when you procrastinate, you're more likely to let your mind wander, giving you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns. "When we finish a project, we file it away. But when it's in limbo, it stays active in our minds." Jihae Shin 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 evaluated how original they were. The procrastinators' ideas were 28 percent more creative. When people played games before being told about the task, there was no increase in creativity. It was only when they first learned about the task and then put it off that they considered more novel ideas. It turned out that procrastination encouraged divergent thinking.
Even some monumental achievements are helped by procrastination. Grant says that according to those who knew him, Steve Jobs procrastinated constantly. Bill Clinton has been described as a "chronic procrastinator" who waits until the last minute to revise his speeches, and Frank Lloyd Wright spent almost a year procrastinating on a commission, to the point that his patron drove out and insisted that he produce a drawing on the spot. It became Fallingwater, Wright's masterpiece. Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter behind Steve Jobs and The West Wing, is known to put off writing until the last minute. When Katie Couric asked him about it, he replied, "You call it procrastination, I call it thinking."
Even some monumental achievements are helped by procrastination. Grant says that according to those who knew him, Steve Jobs procrastinated constantly. Bill Clinton has been described as a "chronic procrastinator" who waits until the last minute to revise his speeches, and Frank Lloyd Wright spent almost a year procrastinating on a commission, to the point that his patron drove out and insisted that he produce a drawing on the spot. It became Fallingwater, Wright's masterpiece. Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter behind Steve Jobs and The West Wing, is known to put off writing until the last minute. When Katie Couric asked him about it, he replied, "You call it procrastination, I call it thinking."
I would rtfa, but I'll do it later.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Why put off till tomorrow what can be done the day after?
Procrastination is my sin, it brings me naught but sorrow, I know that I should stop it, in fact I will tomorrow.
I don't think this applies when the thing you are supposed to be doing but aren't doing is not something creative (like writing code) but instead something simple (like when you are playing Fallout 4 instead of dealing with dirty dishes, dirty clothes and a dirty apartment :)
I'll be putting off my death as long as possible. That makes it healthy.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
I have a rather mundane, obvious reply to this article. But I can't be bothered to type it all out right now.
Please come back tomorrow, when I write an instant "+5 Insightful" comment in its place.
Yaz
"chronic procrastinator"
Is that what you kids call it these days?
I can't tell you how many times I've been asked to do some task, and after putting it off as long as possible find out it no longer was necessary or that the instructions had changed so much that I would have had to redo it, had I originally dropped everything and performed the requested task. There is kind of a fine line, but I've reached the conclusion that, used properly, procrastination is a useful tool to minimize the amount of inefficiency others can inflict upon you.
When you're facing any project that will require creative thought and a bit of narrative at the end such as an essay or presentation, do a bit of deep research early in the cycle so that main points and a crude outline of the objective is apparent, then go about your days keeping the project in mind. Bits and pieces will occur to you at various times and that's when you must take some sort of action: reach into the pocket for notebook and pen or talk into your widget. Every other day gather and consolidate these thoughts to paper or screen. Try to think of the project as 'evolving' rather than a sense of anxiety or dread. Above all, don't try to do it entirely in your mind, there must be some physical recording medium with you at all times. At some point there might be a jotted or spoken note that you'll discover leads to some wry twist of insight, or a novel approach to present the ideas. Like dream images these insights can be fragile, never trust them to memory. Hopefully as the procrastination phase nears its end you'll find a much better outline to fill with detail and polish, and a fine end product.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
They say "28% more creative", but that number sounds like 100% bullshit, depending on how they drew that conclusion.
There's an excellent YouTube video of a talk by John Cleese about creativity. One of the key elements of creating an opportunity for creativity to arise is continuing to ponder and not just taking the first solution that comes to mind.
To be honest, I can see some of that in myself. I became so "smart" with computers because instead of being active, I just lazily sat at front of the PC, tinkering with random shit. When I think of it, I do not have many finished computer projects either.
The Mental Stuff is Almost Done
On the other hand, I think this expression is also true: something like "a task expands to fill the time available." -- [Google]...Ah it's Parkinson's Law.
It's amazing how often something I think is a 'rough first draft' never needs to be revised again.
Adderall.
Procrastination be damned, when I was in college, party until 3 hrs before your projects due, pop an addy, you'll be done with time to spare for a chill out joint!
That's a very nice pile of bullcrap, sir!
....worthless psychology study attempting to pretend it actually earned its money. It's complete garbage like this that makes people not trust what could otherwise be a very serious field.
George Martin's next book should be a winner then!
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
But, well, you know...
Reminds of Murray Gell-Mann's creative process: saturation, incubation and illumination.
Because divergent thinking might make people ponder something different than a literal interpretation of the Bible. This is why procrastination is OF THE DEVIL.
always pays off immediately
became a prime example for creativity due to this.
Really?
A true procrastinator would have never submitted a business idea.
You have to plan how to mix, match, and mold the cruddy stuff & then fire it
Fire first doesn't work.
Hot Grits! By procrastinating I can get a Frist Post whenever I want!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I like how they can quantify creativity so easily.
In the workplace, procrastination can be useful on a project because the requirements can, and often do, change. If the amount of actual work is a small fraction of the time allotted, then putting it off to the end of the timeframe can prevent having to re-do your work when things change. I've met a co-worker who used this reasoning explicitly, and she was very good at getting lots of work done (and on time too).
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
This is why smart is overrated when hiring productive programming teams. Most jobs don't need creative, they just need to be done.
That is why the 'As' hire 'As' and 'Bs' hire 'Cs' theory is crap. With 'As' as managers you will have no schedule (e.g. Google).
The secret is to convince the 'As' to work for the 'Bs' (or as I like to say convince the assholes to put up with the bullshit).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
First post! (9th draft)
Note to self: better turn this in now, it's as good as it's going to get. It's way past the deadline, but better late then never.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
How do you measure creativity? According to them, how creative were Da Vinci? Bach? The idea that you can measure creativity is silly. Furthermore, I think we can agree that thinking deeply about a problem is more likely to lead to a good solution than not, but procrastinating is not the same thing as actively engaging a subject. This reeks of psycho babble clickbait -- after all, who doesn't want to read that procrastinating is good?
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
This is why smart is overrated when hiring productive programming teams. Most jobs don't need creative, they just need to be done.
That is why the 'As' hire 'As' and 'Bs' hire 'Cs' theory is crap. With 'As' as managers you will have no schedule (e.g. Google).
The secret is to convince the 'As' to work for the 'Bs' (or as I like to say convince the assholes to put up with the bullshit).
I used to think you needed a large number of worker bees to complement the highly skilled creative workers. But after almost two decades in the industry, I find that if you actually take the effort to hire As, they do their work well enough that you don't have many mundane tasks best done by C workers.
The trick is actually hiring A workers, not Bs who think they are As. This may be particularly common in IT since so few people understand the IT industry it can be hard to hire well if you don't have a large IT department.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
'To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time. ... “
Procrastination helps/
FallingWater -- that's the one that is falling apart because he didn't bother to do the engineering, right?
too soon?
"Wally period"
http://dilbert.com/strip/2002-02-27
A old work mate of mine did his thesis on decision making, anyway after procrastinating for some time he simply concluded that the best decisions are made at the last possible moment - when we have all the relevant facts available. So what may appear to be procrastination may actually be the evaluation of all information, which of course would include different ideas or approaches we have conceived of ourselves.
but procrastination pays off immediately!!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Call it intuition, flow, procrastinated inspiration, the nine muses or whatever, that's actually your unconscious doing your work and slipping you the answers. Except, it *is* his work too, he is part of you. Heck, the unconscious is probably *most* of you, and that's something our conscience really doesn't likes and tries to hide desperately.
Freud focused on the grim side of our hidden brain—can't blame him, that's where the money was at—but now we know that most of what we do—and what we decide!?—is done without thinking—consciously, that is. Already in 79 Betty Edwards, inspired by the early studies of hemisphere specialization, realized that she needed not teach her students to draw, but simply to do it On the Right Side of the Brain. She ingrains in her students the ability to shut down their concious thinking so the specialized motor and visual centres of their brain can do the heavy (pencil) lifting. For this, she uses some visual aids, and a bunch of tricks to distract or tire conciousness so it will step out of the way. After some 40 hours of practice, most of her students can switch to the visual/perceptual mode at will.
Strangely, we haven't learned many new tricks to talk—or just listen—to our hidden selves since then. In her excellent book A Mind for Numbers—which is the basis for the most popular Coursera class, Learning How to Learn—Barbara Oakley includes many tips to access diffuse/unconscious thinking to solve hard problems or get creative inspiration, all involving distracting or shutting down consciousness—going for a jog or taking a nap, for example. [1]
But we all knew this already. When you forget where did you left the keys, or you have that word in the tip of the tongue, the best you can do is stop thinking about it. What we might not realize, is that this applies to about anything else: whether you're driving, playing music, dancing, painting, writing, cooking, doing sports, if you want to be really good at it, you gotta practice it until you internalize it, until you can do it without "thinking".
Which makes perfect sense. Versatile as it is, our conciousness is terribly slow. 40 bps—or even less—bandwith, with a 500-800ms latency. Try playing some twitch games with that over the net! Rather than a processor, our conciousness might be more like a chipset, a modest switchboard, just trying to pass stuff the right way. So, if you need to react fast, or calculate something complex, don't think, don't even think, think and you'll screw up!
But procrastinating binges as a source of creativity, that's just a lame denial of your Facebook addiction. ;)
[1]. Some studies do contradict the distraction trick, however: "creative thinking does not appear to critically depend on any single mental process or brain region, and it is not especially associated with right brains, defocused attention, low arousal, or alpha synchronization, as sometimes hypothesized."
And the unconscious is not all roses either, but also a source of invisible mischief and discrimination, thanks to its obsolete heuristics, as explained by Shankar Vedantam in his terrifying The Hidden Brain.
Most jobs don't need creative, they just need to be done.
"Done" is subjective. To me, nothing is done until you forgot the last time someone reported an issue or asked why it failed. After I deploy something and it affects 20,000+ customers( 2mil+ users), anything that I missed will consume most of my time, leaving me little time to fix the issue or work on anything else. I think of this as "Amdahl's law" applied to supporting software. It limits the number of projects I can work on based on the amount of imperfections in the code. Other teams you say? Support you own code. When you have to support your code, you learn not to crap where you eat.
Creative things are different, and different things are bad. And if you are the source of those different things, that makes you bad, and hence hated by your colleagues, bosses, underlings (if you have those), and basically everyone you meet. Unless you're in a very rare kind of position, it's better to be as average as possible and creativity doesn't fit in that picture.
That means by waiting nearly 2 days this post is 28% more creative. Thanks science!
That group of bovine standing over there appears quite portentous. That's right it's an ominous cow herd.