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."

Comments

Re:I don't think this applies to me...

[alphatel]

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 bet the guy who invented those fancy disposable plates had a week's worth of dishes waiting for him.

Procrastination serves me well at work.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Procrastination serves me well at work.

[Rei]

I've had this experience with my house design a lot.

I've been held up by a construction boom leaving the country's architects overworked - the year before last I went through three of them because they weren't getting anything done. Last year I decided not to switch again (and thus have to begin from the beginning each time) and it took my architect 11 months to even get to the stage where we need to bring the engineer in. And before that there were lots of delays in finding and buying the property to begin with. But during all that time my planning for the house has really evolved, for the better. It's still an underground steampunk cave house, but it'll be cheaper to build, more comfortable to live in, and with a better look. Even having to switch architects helped because each one helped refine my thought process with their feedback.

Example: when I started my thought process involved actually boring the house out of the ground, like a tunnel, which would have been ridiculously expensive. I moved from that to the concept of building a timber form in a naturally low place, shotcreting it, the burying that. But building big timber domes here is expensive, and shotcrete unusually expensive here too. From there I moved to the current concept of simply making a big pile of compacted ground in a low point in the shape of the house and concreting over it (with forms only needed for where the slope is too steep), and burying that. Way simpler and cheaper.

I moved from having the house physically spread out to make it like a cave, to using convoluted bends to make it actually compact (even with common walls in places) but feel like it's spread out - thus greatly reducing the amount of material. I moved from a plastic ground cloth for waterproofing to multilayered rubberized-bitumen sheeting on compacted sand over the house, as my extra time gave me time to research longevity of different membranes and I found out that that's what's used to waterproof nuclear fuel repositories over great lengths of time. I moved from the idea of a clay-based plaster on the concrete to try to give it a cave-like feel to the concept of simply pressure blasting away the inner cement and exposing the aggregate. I've refined the details on the type of concrete to use greatly, and may now even be doing a research project out of it (FRP-rebar, loose plastic and basalt fiber, basalt dust pozzolan, etc). I came to the realization that due to the lack of limitations on how thick the insulation can be I could use pumice or scoria rather than a foam-based product. Also came to the realization (after taking the time to do heat flow simulations) that while in many "umbrella earth home" designs it's uninsulated under the house, my nearness to the bedrock and potential groundwater means that I should. I've come up with dozens of new steampunk and cave stylistic features to incorporate. And on and on. None of this would have happened had there not been great delays in the process.