It’s a classic dilemma. A deadline is coming up, but you’re not quite finished. Do you hand in the work on time in its half-baked state, or do you miss the deadline, use the extra time to improve the work and hand it in late? Now, it seems, we have a scientific answer to this question. A study published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes this month found that the same piece of work is judged more harshly if it is handed in late than if it is handed in on time. Procrastinate at your peril, the study suggests, because it really does matter if you don’t make that deadline.
This news didn’t strike fear into my heart for a couple of reasons. First, it feels intuitive. If you go to a restaurant and order food, and then it takes ages to come, you want that food to be extra delicious to make up for the time you have sat there getting irritated waiting for it. Second, I am a punctual person. I meet the vast majority of my deadlines. But, for me, procrastination is integral to achieving that. So the takeaway from a study like this can’t, I think, be the abandonment of procrastination in toto.
My ideal working day as a writer includes a certain amount of doing nothing. Not time off from working, strictly, but time when I am just thinking. People generally hate it when I talk about this. Fair enough. What an annoying thing to say, for instance, to a doctor friend: that my work requires dedicated time when I am looking out of the window or walking around aimlessly or cleaning the fridge on a whim. It looks like pure procrastination, it even feels like procrastination a lot of the time – but I am passionate in my defence that it isn’t, quite. I’m not the only one who thinks so. Imagine my delight to find an article called The Perks of Procrastination, on Harvard University’s professional and executive development website. Academia at the highest level supports my choice to noodle around.
If I sit down to do a piece of work too soon, it perversely takes me longer and (I think, although it would be difficult to do a rigorous experiment on this) turns out worse overall. I need time for the task to pull itself into shape in the background while I do other things. I don’t think writing is the only job for which this is true. I can’t speak for whether putting off building a wall improves the quality of the wall – although I would be interested to know – but I do feel confident that any job that involves primarily mental rather than physical labour benefits from a certain amount of this semi-procrastination.
That phrase “a certain amount”, though, is where things get interesting. Procrastination is less an art than an extreme sport. Some is genuinely productive, but too much will ruin your life. It seems that your work will be judged more harshly, if the above study is to be believed, but that’s not the worst of it. Once something is even one minute late, a horrendous vista opens up in front of you. It’s late. You screwed it up already. So what does it matter if it’s a further hour late? Could I get away with a whole day, a week, even, since it will always be late, no matter how quickly I now get to it?
What this can mean is that you sit on the task and allow it to make you miserable for as long as you do not do it, until finally, one day, you turn to face the beast, it takes less than an hour, and you feel wretched afterwards because the satisfaction of doing the task is overshadowed by your self-hatred for not foreseeing that the task would only take 52 minutes – and why on earth did you suffer all week over 52 minutes? This state of play must be avoided at all costs.
So, the right amount of procrastination – what exactly is that? I can’t help you here. It will vary from person to person and task to task. I like to think I’ve got my procrastination timings pretty well worked out. I filed this piece with four minutes to spare, for instance. But it’s a technique that requires careful monitoring and recalibration. I once merrily described my process of built-in procrastination to my mum, who is self-employed too, so also has relatively free rein over how she organises her working life. She laughed ruefully. The technique, she said, eventually stops working so well. The longer you do a certain kind of work, the better you get at it, and the more you can kid yourself that you only really need three hours to do this thing, whereas a decade ago you might have given yourself four. Maybe you are a bit quicker – but perhaps not by a whole hour.
The other factor here is fear. Personally, I need to be genuinely afraid that I do not have enough time left to complete my work to a high standard in order to really get down to it. If you’ve learned that you can actually get your task done relatively easily in three hours, then the fear isn’t going to kick in at T-minus three hours. It’s going to kick in at T-minus two. In my experience, it is just not possible to manufacture the fear that acts like rocket fuel for my work ethic. I have tried saying I must have made X amount of progress by Y time or I will be angry with myself – but I don’t fear my own opprobrium enough. Who cares what that idiot thinks; she just spent 45 minutes on the New York Times Spelling Bee puzzle, which isn’t even that much fun, in the middle of God’s working day.
It’s not a perfect system. In some ways I wish the procrastination portion of my work process did not exist. Because it might work, broadly, but it often doesn’t feel good. I frequently fall prey to the worst of both worlds: not properly working, but not resting and allowing thoughts to flourish either, just sort of pickling and worrying and frittering around. But I would like my battle to continue to be how to procrastinate well, rather than how not to procrastinate at all.
