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The art of creative stalling

"They were supposed to be out hunting and gathering, but instead they were in the cave, painting walls," said Jorge Cham, an authority on procrastination. Cham started his popular comic strip, "Piled Higher and Deeper," in his first quarter of graduate school at Stanford University, where he was overwhelmed by all the requirements.

Now he is an instructor at the California Institute of Technology, and on the side he travels around the US giving a lecture called "The Power of Procrastination." His web site, www.phdcomics. com, reports traffic of more than 5.5 million page views a month. According to one study, procrastination afflicts 15 per cent to 25 per cent of the adult population and is more common in men.

Graduate students and people with unstructured jobs seem to be most easily affected, finding time to write novels, study dead languages, start families, found companies or work second careers as journalists before getting around to that dissertation. I should know.

One reason I’m writing this article is that I have several other deadlines looming for my doctoral work at Harvard University.Though I can get away with it as a student, and Harvard generously grants 10 years for work that could be completed in half that time, professionally it is not that easy. Blame it on the Protestant work ethic, postmodern guilt or just bad PR, but putting off tasks is considered anathema to quality, productivity, career advancement, even mental health.

Studies link procrastination to anxiety and low self-esteem.

But in a world where due hours have replaced due dates and BlackBerry ulcers have nothing to do with diet, not procrastinating can even be more perilous, according to advocates of creative time management. A survey by Integra, a research group, found that 64 per cent of respondents routinely

ended the day with neck pain, 34 per cent reported insomnia because of work-related pressures, and half said they regularly skipped lunch because of professional demands.

Faced with these and even direr prospects, the procrastinator chooses to prioritise —and cut the dead weight. "We’ve discovered that the more things you put off, the more things you find didn’t have to be done in the first place," said Les Waas, an advertising executive and a card-carrying member of the Procrastinators Club of America. "Good procrastination saves an awful lot of time." Beyond health and lifestyle considerations, the club’s 14,000 members —and the half a million or so unofficial members who haven’t gotten around to registering yet —believe procrastination is an alternate form of productivity and a pathway to greater creativity, he said. "The best work that I’ve ever done has been the work that I’ve put off until the last minute and the adrenaline starts flowing," Waas said. "This, for some reason, sparks me to come up with the better ideas."

Of course, not everybody shines under pressure, and there is a difference between calculated procrastination and plain laziness. Cham offered the following distinction: "Laziness is when you don’t want to do anything, and procrastination is when you don’t want to do it now." For the chronically afflicted, there are many methods to snap out of this pattern. Mark Ellwood, president of Pace Productivity, a consulting firm with a Web site at www.getmoredone.com, suggested the following: Break a daunting task down into manageable components and set smaller deadlines; start with the least pleasant task and reward yourself once it is over; allow yourself a limited amount of time to put something off; or ask a friend or colleague to hold you accountable. But repeated reluctance to do certain assignments could also be a symptom of something deeper.

"When you find yourself procrastinating, you usually find yourself doing the things that you really want to do," Cham said, "writing novels or working on physics equations or being a reporter or a doing comic strip." Now that you’re armed with several web sites and the rest of the paper to peruse, I’ll let you get back to work.