You might be more creative if you wait

What's the hurry, anyway?

Do you tend to put things off until the last minute?

Don’t answer yet. (Haha.)

Kidding aside, there’s good news for procrastinators. Ongoing research suggests people might actually do more creative work if they wait until the last minute, rather than planning ahead and managing their time well.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Procrastination vs. Pre-crastination

This is all according to Adam Grant, a professor of management and psychology at Wharton.

Grant says he’s not a natural procrastinator–in fact, he calls himself a “pre-crastinator.”

But one of his former students, Jihae Shin–who is now a professor herself at Yale (and was at the University of Wisconsin at the time)–challenged him on his “pre-crastination” tendencies. The results of her research are quite promising.

As a first step, Shin “surveyed people on how often they procrastinated” at several companies, and “asked their supervisors to rate their creativity,” Grant writes. Good news: “Procrastinators earned significantly higher creativity scores than pre-crastinators.”

So, they dove in deeper. Shin and Grant did a study in which they asked participants to come up with new business ideas. Only, they cut the group into sections.

Some were told to start writing their business ideas right away, Grant wrote, while “others were given five minutes to first play Minesweeper or Solitaire,” before they wrote their plans.

In the experiment, independent judges weighed how creative the business ideas were.

Results? The people who were told to put off working until they’d played early 1990s-era video games for a while came up with ideas that were 28 percent more creative.

(Minesweeper and Solitaire? How early 1990s! I asked Shin directly what was up with that, and she said they'd used computers with an outdated Windows operating system for the study.)

Read this part later, maybe

Grant opines that the explanation behind all this might be that initial ideas are usually the most conventional. He points out that some big thinkers are known as chronic procrastinators (Steve Jobs, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Aaron Sorkin for example.)

Maybe the better lesson is that his colleague Shin had assigned some participants in her business idea plan to wait until the last minute to start.

Their ideas weren’t as creative, because “they had to rush to implement the easiest idea instead of working out a novel one.”

All of which suggests that a sort of controlled procrastination might work best.

Actually, before this turns into a catch-all excuse for people to put off anything and everything, let's break down Grant’s overall advice:

• Imagine when you start what it would be like if you failed spectacularly. Your fear might “jump-start your engine.”

• Break projects into small steps, and define progress as you go along.

• Accomplish work in small periods of time

• Make a commitment to achieve ahead of time, and stick to it.

I've seen this work many times in my writing; ostensibly, I'm off playing with my daughter or wasting time playing my 10th game of chess on my phone, when I "should" be working.

But sometimes that's when my subconscious works on a problem. I find a smart approach to an article that I hadn't thought of or a more authentic and natural ending to something I'd struggled with.

Extremely meta case in point: I pulled together everything in this article up to the bullet points above a few days ago, and wasn't sure how to end it.

Then, I thought about how last night instead of working, I was outside pushing my daughter on the rope swing in the backyard, and how frankly that was a much better use of my time.

Extra benefit: it led me to an ending. This one, right here!

And with 11 minutes to spare!

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7 other things worth knowing today

• A Texas bill on the verge of becoming law would require labels on packaged food from Skittles to Mountain Dew that warn about ingredients “not recommended for human consumption” by other countries beginning in 2027. Texas Senate Bill 25, backed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is now awaiting the signature of Governor Greg Abbott. (Bloomberg)

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to take the rare step of renaming a ship, and is considering renaming several others -- all of which are named after either gay or Black figures from history. First to be renamed will be the oiler USNS Harvey Milk, named after one of the first openly gay elected officials in U.S. history, who was murdered in 1977. The Pentagon is also considering renaming the USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, USNS Harriet Tubman, USNS Dolores Huerta, USNS Lucy Stone, USNS Cesar Chavez and USNS Medgar Evers. USNS is the prefix given to ships that are owned by the Navy, but that are not commissioned warships. (CBS News)

• Prosecutors in Milwaukee have charged a man with four felonies for attempting to frame an undocumented immigrant, by sending forged letters in the immigrant’s name with a threat to kill Donald Trump. Demetric Scott allegedly admitted he wrote the letters in the name of Ramon Morales-Reyes. Among those who fell for the hoax was Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who released a statement praising immigration officers for arresting Morales-Reyes on May 22. (The Guardian)

• The White House unveiled a new portrait of President Trump this week, replacing the image taken in January that had drawn comparisons to a mugshot. In the new photograph, Trump stares directly into the camera. His right eye is slightly squinted and his mouth is pressed into a straight line. He is dressed in a blue suit with one of his signature red ties, and an American flag is pinned to his left lapel. The backdrop is dark and blank. (NPR)

• There are some striking divides in a new CNN poll: The first has to do with the American Dream, which a growing number of Americans feel is out of reach. Most, 54%, still agreed with the idea that “people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard,” in the new poll, conducted by SSRS. Noteworthy, however: When CNN asked the same question back in 2016, more than two-thirds of respondents, 67%, agreed with that optimistic idea. (CNN)

• Three British nationals could face death by a firing squad after they allegedly smuggled about a kilogram – over two pounds – of cocaine onto the island of Bali in Indonesia. A prosecutor said 28-year-old Jonathan Christopher Collyer and 29-year-old Lisa Ellen Stocker were arrested Feb. 1, after customs officers stopped them at the X-ray machine when they found suspicious items disguised as food packages inside their luggage. Two days later, police arrested 31-year-old Phineas Ambrose Float after a delivery sting set up by law enforcement that involved the other two suspects handing the drug to him in the parking lot of a hotel in Denpasar. (Fox News)

• Officials at the United States Embassy and its consulates in Mexico have confirmed several reports of Americans being kidnapped by individuals they met on a dating app. “Victims and their families in the United States have at times been extorted for large sums of money to secure their release,” officials said. “Please be aware that this type of violence is not limited to one geographic area. Travelers should use caution when meeting strangers.” (The Hill)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Sam Balye on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.