Last week I read a column in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times titled, “Step 1: Procrastinate” by Adam Grant, professor of management and psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The gist is this: procrastination is good because as Grant says, “…it’s a virtue for creativity.”
I even learned a new word, “pre-crastination,” which Grant defines as “the urge to start a task immediately and finish it as soon as possible.”
So that’s what you call what I do every day! Truth be told, I would “pre-crastinate” a lot more if I could, but when you’re at the mercy of other people’s schedules, pre-crastination is not always possible.
Grant suggests that pre-crastination might not be the best approach for certain projects. As he learned from one of his students, she got her best ideas after she procrastinated. To back up her claim she even surveyed employees in a couple of companies about how often they procrastinated and then asked their supervisors to rate their creativity. She discovered that procrastinators were often more creative than pre-crastinators.
Grant posits that procrastination encourages divergent thinking, noting that “our first ideas, after all, are usually our most conventional.”
After engaging in an exercise where he delayed starting on creative tasks, Grant found that in every creative project, there are moments that require more lateral and slower thinking and by trying to complete a task more quickly, he was shutting down complicating thoughts that might inspire him to come up with fresher concepts.
He concedes that procrastination can sometimes go too far, at least based on another study conducted by his student who found that of the three groups, pre-crastinators, procrastinators, and a group that waited until the last minute to complete a project, the latter group was the less creative, implementing the simplest idea just to complete the project on time.
This of course is food for thought. It’s not my nature to procrastinate when it comes to work projects. I enjoy a sense of comfort in being a pre-crastinator. Might I be more creative if I waited longer to begin some projects? I don’t know. For the record, this article is the result of pre-crastination. You’re reading it in the January 29 edition of the newsletter, but I wrote most of it on January 19.
