I don’t see a possibility to come up with a really good definition of procrastination. Procrastination just means somewhat like “doing the more urgent tasks later and carrying out the less urgent ones preferably”. And, that it comes with a mostly negative connotation. This is really annoying since it’s not the response expectations “in times of speeding up technology”, but just another tag some people framed, just to differentiate them to the better by mere definition and not based on facts. Science actually shows that there are different reasons for procrastinations and people differ very much what they do when procrastinating.

Frank Partnoy probably was annoyed as well. He’s the author of the book “Wait: The Useful Art of Procrastination” (2012). Frank caught my interest on a science blog because a very good friend and I had a discussion about this phenomenon last summer, so I started reading about this “new” aspect.

Frank wants to show how procrastination can be a good thing. As I understand Frank, procrastination is a delay of your choices to the very end. He explains this by giving various examples. One is about how tennis players react to the speed of a game. Research shows that the ability to wait some more milliseconds to delay their response to a serve is what distinguishes professional from amateur players.
Another one is about jet-pilots. They are trained in military strategy to learn a certain pattern of decision making “observe, orient, decide and act” — OODA. He applies the OODA formula to some more examples to come to the conclusion that it’s purely about correct timing. It’s not so much a concern about the ethics of a jet-pilot versus a tennis game, that distracts me (like you’ll find in this LSE book review: eprints.lse.ac.uk/50554/ ), but it’s more about the question:

Is this really procrastination? Well, I told you: it’s quite hard to find a definition of procrastination.

But I place emphasis on the following: It’s about the exercise!

Both, tennis-pros and jet-pilots are trained to perform their tasks. Their actions become habitual. For an outsider their actions might seem as “too late” and they would perform earlier. But the training allowed the pros to reallocate their resources away from “how to perform a specific task” to “what decision has to be made”.