Why Pre-crastination Is Stunting My Creativity
Last weekend I read this brilliant article by Adam Grant: Why I Taught Myself To Procrastinate. In it, he reflects on his pre-emptive, pro-active nature when it comes to completing tasks. He’s always been the type to start a project as early as possible and waste no time focussing on anything else. Sounds like me.
When he spelled out what this definition is for us — pre-crastinators, as coined by psychologists — I felt relief. There’s a name for people like me and the good news is that my staunch, life-long belief that procrastination is the Devil’s work may in fact be all wrong. It might actually be the case that pre-crastinating — getting started on a creative project, whether that’s a dissertation, a piece of freelance work or coming up with a simple idea for a social campaign straight away and without really stopping until the goal is complete — is stunting my creative potential.
I am the type of person that has to clear my inbox immediately on arrival into work. I have to have a to-do list written up for the following day before I go home that evening. If I know that a piece of work is due in three weeks, no matter what, I will start thinking about it and planning for it right from that very moment onwards. I wont necessarily dedicate all of my attention to it, but it will certainly lingering in the back of my mind, constantly, like a dim headache. It was the same at university, always trying to get a (big) head start on my essays, my dissertation, my examined presentations. I’ve never, ever been the type of person to leave something until the day or two before it is due. The mere thought makes me feel uneasy.
Grant explains in his article how one of his creative students, Jihae, now a professor conducted an experiment to see whether the best and most original ideas really did come after procrastination. She asked people to come up with new business ideas. Some were told to start right away, others were give five minutes to play Minesweeper beforehand. All of the ideas were submitted and independent raters concluded that the procrastinators’ ideas were 28% more creative.
Not the most accurate of experiments, no, but it helps to make a case for the fact that this theory isn’t just one designed to make us all feel a little better about ourprocrastination habits as a nation. It might actually be true.
The reason us pre-crastinators try to tackle the creative problem in front of us as quickly as humanly possible is because we’re concerned what might happen to our thinking, what tangents it might divert off into, if we don’t channel it immediately. This means we may be missing out on new, novel ideas that we didn’t even know we had in us. The slower, more relaxed approach to a deadline might be just what we need to unlock them.
If Steve Jobs and Aaron Sorkin (screenwriter behind the film Steve Jobs & The West Wing) are two well-known procrastinors I have to look up to, then that’s good enough for me. I’m going to try and teach myself the art of procrastination like fellow pre-crastinator Adam Grant. Nothing crazy like waiting until the day before a large piece of work is due — don’t be silly — but at least allowing my thoughts and ideas to percolate a little before putting them straight down on paper. A little procrastination never hurt anyone. In fact, I might just be about to discover my best ideas yet.