Procrastination – It’s Actually Beneficial!

How often do you procrastinate? Because most of us do it! Fear of failing a task you need to complete, or dreading starting task nobody wants to do, such as writing an essay at University, or a long email at work can cause us to procrastinate. 

But you’ll be happy to know, that there’s some scientifically backed evidence which discovers that procrastination can help induce your creative stream. Adam Grant explored the correlation between performance and procrastination habits. He asked some students to generate new business ideas. At random, some people were assigned to start straight away, whilst others were given five minutes to play games before they started.

Now you’d like to know the results!

The moderate procrastinators’ ideas were rated as 16% more creative! The procrastination “encouraged more divergent thinking”.

How You Can Use This Information To Bring New Ideas To Life

There are two types of people, extreme procrastinators and precrastinators. You need to find out which one you are and then you can work our what’s best for you.

A precrastinator are the kind of people who have the urge to get everything done in advance, ahead of schedule. If this is you, you may consider trying to force yourself to wait before starting. 

Short amounts of procrastination can give you time to develop your ideas and think outside the box.

Here’s some advice – try to prevent yourself from going straight into the task you are trying to complete, it may be worth looking over the requirements, writing down a few sentences to get going, or a list of what you plan to do. Then do something active and come back to it. You may find yourself firing new ideas which you couldn’t capture before.

Extreme procrastinators wait until the last minute before completing their task. We advise looking over your assignment or task as soon as you receive it. Work out what is needed from you, and summarise it into smaller bullet points.

Even if you wish to leave your project until a later date, the requirements are in your mind and when you return to it, you won’t be seeing it for the first time. You may even find inspiration from your day to day journeys, and apply it to your project.

We hope this increases your confidence in battling any tasks that you are dreading and you now know, that a moderate amount of procrastination can actually boost your creativity.