Procrastination is Okay if it Works

Every single time I ever took a new class I would tell myself the same thing: I’m not going to procrastinate this time.

Guess what happened every single time.

Sometimes, it would look for a brief moment as if things really were going to be different. A semester-long project would be introduced on day one of class and I would go home and immediately start working on it.

For one afternoon.

I would then pat myself on the back for having successfully killed my bad habit of procrastination and proceed to go do something more enjoyable, not coming back to the project that I was supposedly not procrastinating on until the end of the semester.

Procrastination is a tough bug to kill.

Change is Hard, Choose What You Want to Change Carefully

I think there are actually two forms of procrastination. The one we usually think of is what I described above. There’s a deadline and you don’t kick into action until compelled by the deadline.

This kind of procrastination can be stressful as the deadline approaches, but is it really critical to change?

My experience has been that usually this form of procrastination works out fine. I always thought for sure that the teacher would see right through me, that it would be obvious that I cobbled something that should have taken months together in a couple of nights, but no one ever seemed to notice.

Which begs the question: if it’s working, what’s the problem?

There are reasons behind the procrastination such as fear and insecurity that are worth addressing, but I’m not sure I need to tackle this form of procrastination directly.

There’s a principle that everyone should know called the Pareto Principle that says that in general, 80% of results stem from 20% of the causes.

The top 20% of companies make 80% of the revenue, the top 20% of income earners make 80% of the income, the top 20% of sales people make 80% of the sales, etc.

Essentially, the idea implies that there are changes that make an enormous difference and changes that make little impact.

Since change is difficult, you want to make sure that the change you are seeking to make will be impactful.

The form of procrastination that I’ve been describing may be frustrating at times, but I don’t believe that changing it will make a major impact.

There’s a second, more insidious form of procrastination that most of us aren’t aware of. The results are far more devastating and the solution is far more simple. We’ll talk about that form tomorrow.

For now, let’s consider how the common variety of procrastination can actually be an advantage.

The Life of the Mind and the Process of Creativity

A couple of years ago I took an online course called Learning How to Learn which was enormously influential on my thinking about learning, creativity, and mental rest.

The core idea of the course is that there are two primary states that our mind can be in: focus mode and diffuse mode.

Focus mode is when you are concentrating. It’s like a bowling alley with bumpers. Your thoughts are slung forward, only able to move in one direction with limited room to bounce around.

Diffuse mode is where your mind is at ease and free to wander. It’s more like a pinball machine where a thought can bounce around and make unexpected connections.

So which one of these is better? Both. Or, more accurately, the best strategy is to switch back and forth between the two.

When you are tackling a problem in focus mode, you can get stuck because your mind is locking in to a narrow range. When you exit focus mode, it might seem like you are no longer thinking about the problem, but subconsciously you often are, and every now and then it will flutter to your conscious mind as your brain kicks ideas around.

It can often be walking away from your work that provides the key insights needed for your work.

So in a weird way, my feeble attempts to kick procrastination might be a pretty good strategy. Implant the assignment into my mind with one inspired bout of focus mode, and then leave some time for my thoughts to work themselves out.

When I would procrastinate, one of the reasons why I wouldn’t keep working after the initial burst is because I had no idea what to do next. Once I came back to it at the deadline, things fell into place quickly and easily.

Was it the pressure of the deadline or was it the mental clarity of having subconsciously sorting out my strategy? My guess is a little of both. The deadline banishes perfectionism from my brain so that I am able to more easily move forward with ideas. The time away from the work allows me some time to figure out a good approach.

Sometimes it’s obvious how the time off helps. You get a flash of inspiration and need to write down ideas from your project. Sometimes it’s not so obvious. But one thing that is never obvious is whether procrastination actually leads to poorer outcomes.

Productive Procrastination

One of the implications here is that it is entirely possible that many of the things that we do to “waste time” while procrastinating really aren’t wasting time at all.

Often when I procrastinate, I find myself delaying the work I said I would do by pursuing my various curiosities. This is a highly productive thing to do, since a quality output is dependent on quality input.

You could argue that often I will pursue knowledge that is unrelated to the problem that I am working on, but this could be a benefit for me and not a disadvantage. If I’m writing a piece on a certain topic and only read material on that topic, I’ll end up saying what everyone else is already saying. If I’m exploring ideas that are seemingly unrelated to what I am doing, I can make an unexpected and valuable connection.

For more reading, here’s a great piece of productive procrastination from Nick Wignall:

Procrastination is Still a Problem

Now, despite all that I’ve said, there’s still one problem with waiting until the last minute that I can’t get around: the stress of a deadline.

If the stress is unbearable, this is probably an area in your life than you should work on.

If not, maybe this is a problem you can live with. Instead, you should focus your attention on killing the form of procrastination that is truly harmful. The silent killer of your dreams that has always been lurking in the shadows.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post.

This is the seventh in a series based on my article 30 Lessons About Life You Should Learn Before Turning 30. Shoutout to Dr. Christine Bradstreet 🌴 for the idea to turn the post into an in-depth series.