London - It is a finding that will make procrastinators rejoice – if they ever get round to it.
Putting things off can make us more creative, research suggests.
Workers who said they were procrastinators were considered by their supervisors to have significantly more creative ideas than others, a survey found.
But those addicted to delaying can only push it so far – for leaving things to the very last minute was also found to be bad for creativity.
Adam Grant, a psychology professor at the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania in the US, and one of his students, Jihae Shin, carried out surveys at companies and found procrastinators were considered much more creative than those dubbed ‘precrastinators’ – those who anxiously complete work long before a deadline.
In a second test, workers who were asked to think up new business ideas after playing computer games for five minutes were rated as 28 percent more original by assessors than those who started straight away.
Professor Grant, who published his findings in a book called Originals: How Non-Conformists Move The World, argues that our first ideas are usually quite conventional, but when you procrastinate, you let your thoughts wander while your subconscious mind keeps mulling over the task – allowing new ideas to form.
A third test, however, found that those who left too little time to finish a task rushed to implement the easiest idea rather than coming up with an original one.
Daily Mail