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.”//