Don’t Stop Procrastinating, Just Get Better at It
How to channel a bad habit into something that actually makes your life easier
If you ask Frank Partnoy, a professor at Berkeley Law School and the author of Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, procrastination has gotten a bad name. “The reality is everyone is procrastinating… all the time,” he says—himself included.
Partnoy’s philosophy is this: Procrastination is a necessary part of modern life. We all have more tasks waiting for us than we could possibly do at once, so of course we put things off for days, sometimes weeks. The issue, he says, is when we procrastinate badly — when we wait to study for a huge exam until the last few hours, for example, or when we delay an urgent phone call in favor of mindlessly scrolling through Twitter.
The science underlying procrastination — also known as “task delay” — supports the idea that putting things off can actually be beneficial. Research out of McGill and Seoul National University, for instance, found that for some chronic procrastinators, their delay tactics culminated in “performance outcomes that were nearly identical to — and in some cases even better than — those of non-procrastinators.”
The balancing act here is to relax and be kind to yourself but…
