After saying that, however, he writes about how something he calls creative procrastination can be a massive asset for writers. Block used to very quickly transform ideas into written text when he was in his youth. He would get one idea on an afternoon and have a written story ready for his agent the following morning (!). As he became older, he let go of the habit of immediately starting typing out this ideas.

As an example of how creative procrastination helped him he describes his experience of writing a mystery story. It began by him getting the idea to the story, he got what he calls a Noteworthy Idea. In his youth he would have gone straight to his typewriter to type out the story. In this case he wouldn’t have gotten far because he didn’t have anything other than an undeveloped idea, a fragment of a thought. He had no plot, no theme, no characters and no conflict — he lacked all the details necessary for good (or at least passable) fiction.

Instead of starting working on the story immediately, he scribbled down the idea on his todo list. He saw the idea every now and then — every time he looked at his memo pad. Block goes on describing how when he read the the note about the idea, his subconscious would develop it slightly, make it a bit fuller and more detailed.

By letting the idea rest, and by not starting to work on it immediately, Block allowed the idea to develop in his mind, while he was busy writing other stories and reading inspiring books and poetry. Then, one day, he felt that he was ready to write the story. So he sat down at his typewriter and started typing.

Block calls this process creative procrastination. I think that creative incubation is a more apt name for what he did. While it’s procrastination in the sense that there’s postponement involved, I don’t consider it procrastination if you let an idea rest before you have some kind of plan of action. I’m not a fiction writer and don’t plan on becoming one, but it makes sense to let ideas develop in your subconscious a while before you start typing them out.

That’s not procrastination, that’s just a smart thing to do.

A key part of this process is to keep the Noteworthy Idea visible.

“It’s important, I think, to keep the idea visible — in a notebook, on a wallchart, whatever. That way you’ll jog your memory from time to time, and when an idea or a piece of information comes along that you can use, you’ll reach out and incorporate it in the story as it evolves.”

And as for the difference between regular procrastination and creative procrastination, Block writes:

“When it [procrastination] consists of avoiding work rather than postponing it, and when my alternative to working on Project A is not working at all. Since I’m inherently lazy, I force myself to work on Project B instead.”

I don’t know how useful it’s to label yourself as “inherently lazy” and I think there are better ways of getting started than “forcing” yourself, but those are subjects for another post. If you get a good idea, write it down, look at it at regular intervals, and notice how your subconscious develops it automatically until you one day pretty much just know what you want to write, or create.

academic procrastination

For many students procrastination is an essential part of the college lifestyle. We’ve all heard the anecdotes about the all-nighters, the late term papers and the creative excuses people come up with. According to Ellis & Knaus [1977]  around 70% of all college students procrastinate. That’s a huge percentage of the student population.

pre-internet procrastination

It’s worth noting that these figures are from the late 70s. I wasn’t around back then, but I’m pretty sure that ubiquitous internet connections, cell phones and computers weren’t  available for the students of that time. Despite that , those who were students then, procrastinated — a lot.

That tells us something about the problem of procrastination — it’s not  about the distractions around us. Yes, you might be spending a lot of time on Facebook, on Youtube or on reading blogs, but that doesn’t mean that those things are the cause of your procrastination. They are merely the symptoms, the displacement activities you use. [displacement activity = the thing you do instead of doing what you should be doing]

More recent studies confirm that procrastination is common. One study from 1984 (still pre-ubiquitous-internet) reports that half of all students say that procrastination is a moderately or highly problematic problem for them [Solomon et al]. Day gives a similar picture, reporting that about 50% of college students procrastinate chronically [Day et al. 2000].

procrastination is normally distributed

Schouwenburg — editor of the the book Counseling the Procrastinator in Academic Settings
–  writes about procrastination in a conference paper from 2005. He discusses the results of a procrastination survey that was given to two thousand students. When the data from the survey is plotted on a diagram, you see that procrastination is normally distributed among students. The base rate of procrasination is high, that is, most students procrastinate to at least some degree.

problematic procrastination?

Schouwenburg notes that there’s no clear definition of when procrastination should be classified as problematic or chronic. Many arbitrary conventions are used. For example, if you define people who  according to the survey procrastinate one  standard deviation more than the mean as problematic procrastinators, you end up with a figure of about 10%. In other words, for about 200 of the two thousand students who participated in the survey, procrastination is a major problem.

the rest of the population

That students procrastinate a lot is hardly surprising. But what about the rest of the population? Are adults, working in ‘real’ jobs with ‘real’ deadlines, and where postponements result in ‘real’ consequences doing any better? Perhaps, but not by a large degree.

Depending a bit on which data you look at, it looks like about one in five have major problems with procrastination. That’s what McCown and Johnson reported in a paper from 1989. It’s worth noting that for forty percent of the people, procrastination had caused significant financial loss. Schouwenburg writes that one fifth of all students say that they procrastinate when it comes to doing routine tasks such as paying the bills or the taxes, or visiting the doctor’s office (Schouwenburg, 2004).

summary

It’s clear that procrastination is prevalent, especially among college students. This can be comforting to know while you’re struggling with getting started. It also means that if you manage to reduce or eliminate your procrastination behavior, you’ll be far ahead of a large part of the population.

References

Ellis, A., & Knaus, W. J. (1977). Overcoming procrastination. New York: Signet Books.

Day, V., Mensink, D., & O’Sullivan, M. (2000). Patterns of academic procrastination. Journal of College Reading and Learning, 30, 120–134.

McCown, W., & Johnson, J. (1989). Validation of an adult inventory of procrastination. Paper presented at the Society for Personality Assessment, New York.

Solomon, L. J., & Rothblum, E. D. (1984). Academic procrastination: Frequency and
cognitive-behavioral correlates. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 31, 503-509.

Schouwenburg, H. C. (2004). Trait procrastination in academic settings: An overview of students who engage in task delays. In H.C. Schouwenburg, C. Lay, T. Pylchyl, & J. Ferrari, (Eds.), Counselling the procrastinator in academic settings  (pp. 3-18). Washington: American Psychological Association.

Schouwenburg. On Counselling the Procrastinator in Academic settings. Fedora Psyche Conference. June, 2005.

I try hard to identify my most dangerous patterns of thought, but since the most dangerous ones are by definition those difficult to detect or apt to masquerade as beneficial, progress is slow. By “dangerous”, I generally mean the ones that excuse mediocrity. Procrastination’s thousand guises provide ready, accessible examples: “I’ll work on the project first thing in the morning.” “I’ll start the diet next week.” “I’ll get to that novel someday.” But the literature on procrastination forms mountains; I’ll refrain from adding my own crag today.

The dangerous thought I recently caught in one of its unguarded moments gets much less press than the p-word, but it’s similar in form and quite possibly even more poisonous. I call it the “Things will be fine when x” mindset, where x is any future condition or set of conditions.

Read the rest of Colin Marshall’s post “If only”

My  cross-country  trip had  been  based  on an assumption and a gamble. The  assumption was that  the borrower was going to stop payment  on  the  $15,000 check;  the  gamble was  that  he would make the mistake  of procrastinating and  not take care  of the matter until  the  bank opened  the next morning.

I grabbed  a couple  hours of restless  sleep  at the motel,  then dragged  myself out of bed  at the crack  of dawn.  I was  taking no chances on  not  being at  the  front  door of  the  bank  when  it opened.  I felt as  though  I hadn’t slept  in a week,  but a  cold shower and  the thought of $15,000  was stimulating enough  to keep me moving.

Winning Through Intimidation (nowadays sold as To Be or Not to Be Intimidated? That is the Question) by Robert Ringer. Pg 82.