No, filing your tax return at 11:59 pm on the due date is not necessarily a good idea… But yes, there ARE advantages in procrastination!

And just because everyone seems to think it’s a bad habit to eliminate doesn’t mean we should turn a blind eye to the advantages of procrastination.

Because not everything is all black and white!

And if we often talk about the disadvantages and negative consequences of procrastination, procrastinating also has advantages that we don’t talk about enough!

Today, I suggest that we stop blaming ourselves, stop self-flagellation and focus on the advantages of procrastination to play down this (not so) bad habit!

Advantage of procrastination #1:
Being accustomed to working under pressure

Finally, when you’re a pro at procrastination, you always end up working with super-short timing and being under pressure. And, even though we’ll always say it’s a bad habit, it’s also a quality!

Working with adrenaline, under pressure, is not a quality that everyone can claim. The advantage of procrastination is that it is a kind of permanent training for those situations where you will be asked to do a job in a very short time.

Creating a big deck of slides for tomorrow? No problem, it’s kind of your routine after all.

Advantage of procrastination #2:
Taking the time to dig into your ideas

Procrastinating a task allows time to mature your ideas: you don’t necessarily stop at the first idea you have, but you give your brain time to explore many different ideas.

In fact, when we procrastinate on a task, it’s sometimes simply because we don’t have the right idea yet, the one that makes us want to get on with it.

Procrastinating allows you to take the time to explore a lot of ideas, and dig them out before taking action. Like the maturation time of a good wine, procrastination also allows you to have more interesting and more accomplished ideas than you can with your first instinct.

Advantage of procrastination #3:
Increasing your efficiency & creativity

 

It doesn’t look like it, but procrastination is a creativity booster!

Finally, postponing a task to the last moment forces you to be creative in its execution. The lack of time available forces us to find ways of doing things that are not always academic, but more creative and often devilishly more efficient than “the right way to do it”.

In the end, these shortcuts that we imagine when we are under pressure from over procrastinating can become real super efficient work habits.

 

Advantage of procrastination #4:
Saving time

 

One of the great advantages of procrastination is that it saves us time.

I know it’s very counterintuitive, but I promise you it’s true!

Are you familiar with Parkinson’s law?

It’s a time-management law that says, “All work shall be spread out so as to occupy the time available for its completion”.

In other words: whether you are given 1 hour or 1 day to do a job, you will use all the time you have to do it.

The advantage of procrastination is that by pushing back the tasks you have to do, you decrease the time available to do them.

In the end, you complete in 1 hour what you would have taken 1 day to do if you hadn’t procrastinated.

I’ll let you do the math, but for me, it’s called saving time!

Advantage of procrastination #5:
Focusing on the essentials

Procrastinate allows you to focus on the essentials.

By putting off certain tasks from one day to the next and then from one week to the next, we often find that they are much less essential than we imagined. And that it may be more productive to focus on other, more important projects.

Whether you’re using a journal or a PROJO planner, the principle of task migration allows you to “procrastinate smartly”.

Because migrating tasks is not just a matter of moving them from one page to the next to postpone their completion. Migrating a task is also an opportunity to question its importance:

👉🏻 Is this task really worth the time it takes me to complete it?

👉🏻 Is it important?

👉🏻 What would happen if this task was NEVER completed? What consequences would it have?

Procrastinating helps to put the importance of tasks into perspective in our to-do. In the end, the least important tasks will be eliminated naturally by being postponed.

And that’s time and energy freed up for what really matters!

 

Advantage of procrastination #6:
Finding unsuspected resources

You already thought it was game over, that you’d never manage to achieve this thing you’ve been putting off for months in time and finally you did it!

More proof that you’re resourceful!

We are not always aware of it, but we are full of unsuspected resources.

Last-minute work and the pressure of procrastination are revealing: they allow us to discover resources that lie dormant within us and only ask to be uncover.

 

Advantage of procrastination #7:
Learning to be in the present moment

 The concept of procrastination is not limited to postponing the moment of accomplishing a task out of sheer laziness. Procrastinating can also mean being present at the moment, and enjoying the moment without letting your task list drive the game.

Procrastinating can also mean allowing time to live, to dream, to enjoy your loved ones or the ray of sunshine that falls on the couch. And there’s no reason to feel guilty about seizing those simple moments that make up the small joys of everyday life.

Advantage of procrastination #8:
You have a lot to discuss

 You’re always up to date on the latest Netflix shows and that counts!
(And of all the benefits of procrastination, this is my favourite).

 

Of course, procrastination isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If procrastination is preventing you from moving forward with the projects that are important to you, it’s time to do something about it!

The good news is that I’ve put all the tools and tips you need to stay focused and motivated in The Daily Booster workbook.

Now all you have to do is discover them to move your projects forward!