Wait or procrastinate

Just when we thought that we had the procrastinators on the run, out comes this book recommending the very opposite. It says you should wait till the very last second before making a decision or taking any action. Our family is split evenly between the procrastinators and the quick decisive ones and so this book comes at a very discouraging time for me since I am not a procrastinator!

Frank Partnoy's "Wait: The Art and Science of Delay" is about the value of waiting. His examples range widely, and so does the time scale of the delay involved: the elite baseball hitter's ability to wait the extra milliseconds to "find" a pitch; the comedian's ability to wait a few seconds to deliver a punchline; the skilled matchmaker's advice that blind daters suppress their snap judgments and wait a full hour before deciding whether they might want to go on a second date; the innovative company's ability to hang on to creative ideas, for months or even years, until they pay off. "We are hard-wired to react quickly," Mr. Partnoy says. "Modern society taps into that hardwiring, tempting us to respond instantly to all kinds of information and demands. Yet we are often better off resisting both biology and technology."

For example, most people are taught that you should apologize right away. But in most cases, it tuns out, delayed apologies are more effective. If you’ve wronged a spouse or partner or colleague in some substantive, intentional way, they will want time to process information about what you’ve done. If you acknowledge what you did, and delay the apology, then the wronged party has a chance to tell you how they feel in response, and your apology is much more meaningful.

In technology, the story of how the Post-It Note was developed at 3M is a classic case in the business innovation canon. Mr. Partnoy recounts how the inventors of a new adhesive, casting about for ways to use it, were inspired to create bookmarks that would stick inside a book but leave no residue. The management at 3M thought the bookmark market was too small to pursue. Employees at the company eventually started to use the sample "bookmarks" for writing notes—completing the creative act by discovering a valuable purpose for the invention. The story is said to show the value of serendipity, or perseverance, or the eureka moment. In Mr. Partnoy's telling, however, the moral is different. He focuses on the 12-year delay between the invention of the adhesive and the launch of the notepad product, emphasizing that the inventors and the company were content to wait and keep the project alive in the hope that something would come of it. 3M's policy of letting employees use 15% of their time for new projects, later one-upped by Google's 20% time policy (since eliminated), may have had something to do with its ability to delay gratification but the delayed decision led to a path breaking innovation!

But too much waiting can't be good, can it? Twelve years is a long time to procrastinate for results! Mr. Partnoy is not so sure. He recommends waiting until the last possible moment to make decisions or take positions, on the grounds that waiting gives you the benefit of all the time you possess, allowing ideas to form and thoughts to coalesce. He cites technology investor and guru Paul Graham, who notes that even when we are procrastinating we are not doing nothing—we are doing something other than what we are "supposed" to be doing. Sometimes the task we avoid turns out to be less important than the one we choose to focus on. And perhaps other people will do the things we are avoiding!

These strategies don't always work, of course. Delaying a task could mean forgetting important information when we finally get around to doing it. Procrastinating can leave you with a meticulously organized closet but no money left to buy clothes after you pay the late fees to the IRS and return the advance on your novel. Paradoxically, minimizing important commitments can be a bad strategy for the procrastinator, since he will then have proportionally more unimportant things to capture his time and attention. 

Historically, for human beings, procrastination has not been regarded as a bad thing. The Greeks and Romans generally regarded procrastination very highly. The wisest leaders embraced procrastination and would basically sit around and think and not do anything unless they absolutely had to. The idea that procrastination is bad really started in the Puritanical era with Jonathan Edwards’s sermon against procrastination and then the American embrace of “a stitch in time saves nine,” and this sort of work ethic that required immediate and diligent action. But in recent studies, managing delay is an important tool for human beings. People are more successful and happier when they manage delay. Procrastination is just a universal state of being for humans. We will always have more things to do than we can possibly do, so we will always be imposing some sort of unwarranted delay on some tasks. Some scientists have argued that there are two kinds of procrastination: active procrastination and passive procrastination. Active procrastination means you realize that you are unduly delaying mowing the lawn or cleaning your closet, but you are doing something that is more valuable instead. Passive procrastination is just sitting around on your sofa not doing anything.The question is not whether we are procrastinating, it is whether we are procrastinating well !

There are a few who have taken action the procrastinators. A publisher in Argentina decided to light a fire under those of us who sometimes procrastinate when it comes to actually cracking open a new book. They’ve printed a book that goes away if you don’t read it. No, the actual book is still in your hands, but as time passes, and the ink is exposed to air and light, the actual words go away. On average you have two months to read their publication, before it turns into a lovely blank page volume that you can then use as a journal. Sad to say, this experiment could have used some time to procrastinate before rushing into print.

Perhaps the way to go is to call procrastination, "managing delay". Now you are not procrastinating, you're managing delay. And that is a very important lesson in life and business, which is to delay gratification. People are better off and they're happier, they make better decisions, when they're able to delay gratification. And that's true whether or not the time frame is milliseconds long or months long or years long. 

As the psychologist Robert Sternberg says: "The essence of intelligence would seem to be in knowing when to think and act quickly, and knowing when to think and act slowly."