Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate
(2016-11-16 01:19:33)Adam
Grant
NORMALLY, I would have finished this column weeks ago. But I kept putting it off because my New Year’s resolution is to procrastinate more.
I guess I owe you an explanation. Sooner or later.
We
think of procrastination as a curse. Over 80 percent of college
students are
But while procrastination is a vice for productivity, I’ve learned — against my natural inclinations — that it’s a virtue for creativity.
For
years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early.
In graduate school I submitted my dissertation two years in
advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my
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:
In
college, my idea of a productive day was to start writing at 7 a.m.
and not leave my chair until dinnertime. I was chasing “flow,”
the mental state described by the
psychologist
But
procrastinators, as the writer Tim Urban describes it on the
blog
If
you’re a procrastinator, overcoming that monkey can require
herculean amounts of willpower. But a pre-crastinator may need
equal willpower to
A few years ago, though, one of my most creative students, Jihae Shin, questioned my expeditious habits. She told me her most original ideas came to her after she procrastinated. I challenged her to prove it. She got access to a couple of companies, surveyed people on how often they procrastinated, and asked their supervisors to rate their creativity. Procrastinators earned significantly higher creativity scores than pre-crastinators like me.
I wasn’t convinced. So Jihae, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin, 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 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 considered more novel ideas. It turned out that procrastination encouraged divergent thinking.
Our
first ideas, after all, are
Begrudgingly, I acknowledged that procrastination might help with everyday creativity. But monumental achievements are a different story, right?
Wrong. Steve Jobs procrastinated constantly, several of his
collaborators have told me. Bill Clinton has
been
So what if creativity happens not in spite of procrastination, but because of it? I decided to give it a try. The good news is that I am no stranger to self-discipline. So I woke up one morning and wrote a to-do list for procrastinating more. Then I set out to achieve the goal of not making progress toward my goals. It didn’t go excellently.
My first step was to delay creative tasks, starting with this article. I resisted the temptation to sit down and start typing, and instead waited. While procrastinating (i.e., thinking), I remembered an article I had read months earlier on pre-crastination. It dawned on me that I could use my own experiences as a pre-crastinator to set the stage for readers.
Next, I drew some inspiration from George Costanza on
“Seinfeld,” who made it a habit to
Once I did finish a draft, I put it away for three weeks. When I came back to it, I had enough distance to wonder, “What kind of idiot wrote this garbage?” and rewrote most of it. To my surprise, I had some fresh material at my disposal: During those three weeks, for example, a colleague had mentioned the fact that Mr. Sorkin was an avid procrastinator.
What I discovered was that in every creative project, there are moments that require thinking more laterally and, yes, more slowly. My natural need to finish early was a way of shutting down complicating thoughts that sent me whirling in new directions. I was avoiding the pain of divergent thinking — but I was also missing out on its rewards.
Of course, procrastination can go too far. Jihae randomly assigned a third group of people to wait until the last minute to begin their project. They weren’t as creative either. They had to rush to implement the easiest idea instead of working out a novel one.
To
curb that kind of destructive procrastination, science offers some
useful guidance. First, imagine yourself failing spectacularly, and
the ensuing frenzy of anxiety
But
if you’re a procrastinator, next time you’re wallowing in
the
Adam Grant is a
THE PROVENANCE OF THIS ARTICLE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/why-i-taught-myself-to-procrastinate.html?_r=0