If you are a young student, like more than half of those who attend The Bold Memory, the statistics say you have an 80% chance of suffering from chronic procrastination. You surely know that procrastination has become the public enemy number one. They give you the benefits of procrastination in the following steps.
If you are now a responsible adult, the statistics are not much better and give you a 60% chance of being a chronic procrastinator.
I tell you sincerely that, reading too many blogs, I got bored with it and decided that there are at least two good reasons to speak well of procrastination:
- The first is that procrastination brings you a real mine of benefits you need to know
- The second is that I don’t like recipes. They have a background of obtuseness and conformism that disturbs me.
The benefits of procrastination
If you feel guilty because you continually postpone, you will be pleased to know that you have certain benefits:
Procrastination gives you a complete picture
Anticipating decisions often means taking them based on incomplete information. By waiting until the last, you can instead consider any new information.
Think of the goalkeeper who needs to save a penalty: if he throws himself too early, the attacker will inevitably shoot on the opposite side. If he manages to wait the last millisecond before shooting, he can unmask any pretense that is made to him.
If you postpone to the last, you have time to do things better
For example, if you have a week to deliver a job and use it all, the final work may be better than if done in just 3 days. In reality, most chronic procrastinators do not take advantage of this extra time.
There is a special category of people, the pre-riders (don’t look for it, it doesn’t exist in the dictionary), who, for the anxiety of not finishing in time, start and end too quickly. And they do things badly.
Procrastination prevents you from wasting time on unnecessary things
Postponing, some things resolve themselves. You simply realize that there is no need to do them. Surely it has already happened to you, right? And then throw yourself systematically into an activity without having the certainty that it is necessary to make it cause in the long term expenditure of enormous energy and time.
Procrastination makes you understand what is important to you
Postponing something over and over can be a sign that it is not important to you. The procrastination of a decision or an activity can be the spy of something wrong that you hear about the activity in question.
So, if you declare an objective but continually postpone the actions necessary to achieve it, perhaps the problem is not that you are lazy, but resides in something deeper and upstream. This is something deeper that you need to focus on solving the problem.
Procrastination stimulates your creativity
This is perhaps the most important advantage of all. Numerous scientific studies have shown that procrastination promotes “divergent thinking,” that is, original and creative thinking.
In fact, you immediately pass to the decision and the action. You cannot do that based on pre-established schemes, automatisms, prejudices and preconceptions. The result will be completely within your comfort zone, which is conservative and not very original.
Instead, procrastinating gives you time to overcome preconceptions and get new and original ideas into your behavioral system. So, it would seem that being a chronic procrastinator has some advantage …
