Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate
We think of procrastination as a curse. But while procrastination is a vice for productivity, it’s a virtue for creativity. Adam Grant, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about the positive side of procrastination.
For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my senior 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, postponement is agony. When a flurry of emails lands in your inbox and you don’t answer them instantly, you feel as if your life is spinning out of control.
A few years ago, though, one of my most creative students, Jihae Shin, questioned my habits. She told me her most original ideas came to her after she procrastinated. I challenged her to prove it.
So Jihae, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin, designed some experiments. She asked people to come up with new business ideas. Some people 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 percent more creative.
Minesweeper is awesome, but it wasn’t the driver of the effect. 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 came up with more novel ideas. It turned out that procrastination encouraged divergent thinking.
Our first ideas, after all, are usually our most conventional. My thesis in college ended up replicating a bunch of existing ideas instead of introducing new ones. When you procrastinate, you’re more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns.
Steve Jobs procrastinated constantly, several of his collaborators have told me. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright spent almost a year procrastinating on a commission, until finally his patron drove out and insisted that he produce a drawing on the spot. The drawing became Fallingwater , Wright’s masterpiece. Aaron Sorkin, a respectable screenwriter, is known to put off writing until the last minute. When journalist Katie Couric asked him about it, he replied, “You call it procrastination, I call it thinking.”
We think of procrastination as a curse. But while procrastination is a vice for productivity, it’s a virtue for creativity. Adam Grant, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about the positive side of procrastination.
For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my senior 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, postponement is agony. When a flurry of emails lands in your inbox and you don’t answer them instantly, you feel as if your life is spinning out of control.
A few years ago, though, one of my most creative students, Jihae Shin, questioned my habits. She told me her most original ideas came to her after she procrastinated. I challenged her to prove it.
So Jihae, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin, designed some experiments. She asked people to come up with new business ideas. Some people 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 percent more creative.
Minesweeper is awesome, but it wasn’t the driver of the effect. 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 came up with more novel ideas. It turned out that procrastination encouraged divergent thinking.
Our first ideas, after all, are usually our most conventional. My thesis in college ended up replicating a bunch of existing ideas instead of introducing new ones. When you procrastinate, you’re more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns.
Steve Jobs procrastinated constantly, several of his collaborators have told me. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright spent almost a year procrastinating on a commission, until finally his patron drove out and insisted that he produce a drawing on the spot. The drawing became Fallingwater , Wright’s masterpiece. Aaron Sorkin, a respectable screenwriter, is known to put off writing until the last minute. When journalist Katie Couric asked him about it, he replied, “You call it procrastination, I call it thinking.”