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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.
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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 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>
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.
But, well, you know...