Precrastination: When to Stop

I could have written this article a few weeks ago. But I deliberately put off this occupation, because I solemnly swore to myself that now I will always put off all things for later.

We tend to think of procrastination as a curse that ruins productivity. More than 80% of students because of her sit through the night before the exam, catching up. Nearly 20% of adults admit to chronically procrastinating. Unexpectedly for myself, I discovered that procrastination is necessary for my creativity, although for many years I believed that everything should be done in advance.

I wrote my dissertation two years before my defense. In college, I handed in written assignments two weeks before the due date, finished my graduation project 4 months before the deadline. Friends joked that I had a productive variant of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Psychologists have come up with a term for this condition — «precrastination».

Precrastination — an obsessive desire to start work on a task immediately and complete it as soon as possible. If you are an avid precrastinator, you need progress like air, a hitch causes agony.

When messages fall into your inbox and you don’t reply right away, it feels like life is spinning out of control. When you miss the day of preparing for a presentation that you are due to speak in a month, you feel a terrible emptiness in your soul. It’s like the Dementor is sucking the joy out of the air.

A productive day in college for me looked like this: at 7 in the morning I started writing and did not get up from the table until the evening. I was chasing «flow» — a state of mind when you are completely immersed in a task and lose your sense of time and place.

Once I was so immersed in the process that I did not notice how the neighbors had a party. I wrote and did not see anything around.

Procrastinators, as Tim Urban noted, live at the mercy of the Immediate Pleasure Monkey, which constantly asks questions like: “Why use a computer for work when the Internet is waiting for you to hang on it?”. Fighting it requires a titanic effort. But it takes the same amount of effort from the precrastinator not to work.

Jiai Shin, one of my most gifted students, questioned the usefulness of my habits and said that the most creative ideas come to her just after a pause in work. I demanded proof. Jiai did a little research. She asked employees of several companies how often they procrastinate, and asked bosses to rate creativity. Procrastinators were among the most creative employees.

I wasn’t convinced. So Jiai prepared another study. She asked students to come up with innovative business ideas. Some started work immediately after receiving the task, others were first given to play a computer game. Independent experts evaluated the originality of the ideas. The ideas of those who played on the computer turned out to be more creative.

Computer games are great, but they didn’t influence creativity in this experiment. If students played before they were given an assignment, creativity did not improve. Students found original solutions only when they already knew about a difficult task and postponed its execution. Procrastination created the conditions for divergent thinking.

The thoughts that come to mind first are usually the most ordinary. In my thesis, I repeated hackneyed concepts instead of exploring new approaches. When we procrastinate, we allow ourselves to be distracted. This gives more chances to stumble upon something unusual and present the problem from an unexpected perspective.

About a hundred years ago, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik discovered that people remember unfinished business better than completed tasks. When we finish a project, we quickly forget it. When the project remains in limbo, it sticks out in memory like a splinter.

Reluctantly, I agreed that procrastination could spur day-to-day creativity. But grandiose tasks are a completely different story, right? No.

Steve Jobs constantly procrastinated, as several of his former associates admitted to me. Bill Clinton is a chronic procrastinator who waits until the last minute before a speech to edit his speech. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright spent almost a year procrastinating on what would become a masterpiece of world architecture: Houses Above the Falls. Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter of Steve Jobs and The West Wing, is notorious for putting off writing a screenplay until the last minute. When asked about this habit, he replied, «You call it procrastination, I call it a thought process.»

It turns out that it is procrastination that promotes creative thinking? I decided to check. First, I made a plan on how to start procrastinating, and set myself the goal of not making too much progress in solving problems.

The first step was to postpone all creative tasks for later. And I started with this article. I fought the urge to start work as soon as possible, but I waited. While procrastinating (that is, thinking), I remembered an article about procrastination that I read a couple of months ago. It dawned on me that I can describe myself and my experience — this will make the article more interesting for readers.

Inspired, I began to write, occasionally stopping in the middle of a sentence to pause and return to work a little later. After finishing the draft, I put it aside for three weeks. During this time, I almost forgot about what I had written, and when I reread the draft, my reaction was: “What kind of idiot wrote this rubbish?” I have rewritten the article. To my surprise, during this time I have accumulated a lot of ideas.

In the past, by completing projects like this quickly, I blocked the path to inspiration and deprived myself of the benefits of divergent thinking, which allows you to find different solutions to a problem.

Of course, procrastination must be kept under control. In Jiaya’s experiment, there was another group of people who started the task at the last minute. The works of these students were not very creative. They needed to hurry, so they chose the easiest ones, and did not come up with original solutions.

How to curb procrastination and ensure that it brings benefits, not harm? Apply science-proven techniques.

First, imagine how you fail the project and what will be the consequences. Anxiety might keep you busy.

Secondly, do not try to achieve maximum results in a short time. Psychologist Robert Boyes, for example, taught students to write for 15 minutes a day — this technique helps to overcome a creative block.

My favorite trick is the pre-commitment. Let’s say you’re a staunch vegetarian. Set aside a small amount of money and give yourself a deadline. If you break the deadline, you will have to transfer the deferred funds to the account of a large producer of meat delicacies. The fear that you will support principles you despise can be a powerful motivator.