6 Benefits of Procrastinating – It’s not all Bad!

What is the best thing about doing anything?

Yes, that’s right – it’s procrastinating. But for most of us, procrastinating is not really a bad thing – or is it?

While a lot of us know that it is bad behavior, there are some underlying benefits of procrastinating. For those who are new to this term- procrastinating basically means intentionally delaying a task be it doing something or going somewhere. Knowing this, It may come as a shock to you that we are talking about the benefits of procrastinating but remember – there is nothing that is completely good or bad.

1) It May Boost your Creativity

The main theory behind this is that the more you delay your work, the more you think about ways to finish it quickly when you start doing this. This thinking eventually leads to you thinking of new and creative ways to complete the task quicker. This means that the longer you procrastinate about doing your work, the more creative ways you come up with to do your work as you think about your work.

That being said, this benefit is only applicable if your work is something that has space for creativity. For technical work that needs to follow a lot of rules, being creative doesn’t really have many benefits and hence this benefit of procrastinating may not apply to those types of tasks.

2) You Have More Time For Yourself

Since procrastinating is literally delaying a task intentionally, while doing this you tend to create quite a bit of free time. Since this is the time that you get by avoiding the work, it means that you can literally do whatever you want – as long as it is appropriate. The more you procrastinate, the more time you have for yourself. This is one of those weird benefits of procrastinating that nobody notices until they have none left.

While most people doodle or idle during this time, some of you may actually do something productive.

3) It Helps in Prioritiztion

How to Prioritize - 5 Simple but Tough Tips

The logic behind this is rather simple. People normally only procrastinate when they can afford to do so. Let’s be honest, nobody will procrastinate when they have to submit a 40-page thesis, 20 Page report, and 30-page essay within the next day – all at the same time. They only do so if they have time to do so.

This means that the tasks that you procrastinate on are usually tedious, boring, or unimportant. Categorizing the tasks is actually an important part of prioritization. So while you are procrastinating, you are also learning how to filter out the important tasks and learn how to prioritize. This is one of those benefits of procrastinating that people don’t normally notice unless it is pointed out.

4) It Helps to Develop Our Work Speed

While this is not an innate benefit of procrastinating, this increase in speed of working is related to it. While you are basically slacking off while procrastinating when the deadline nears you would need to finish the work. Since you have spent most of the working time doing nothing and you have a limited time left, this forces you to either increase your work speed or miss the deadline and get punished (figuratively).

If you do this enough times your general work speed will eventually increase as your mind will get used to the working speed at the end of the procrastination period. This is an often underlooked benefit of procrastinating that is developed at the risk of missing the deadline to submit your work.

5) It Lowers Your Expectations of The Result

This is a benefit of procrastinating that can’t really be called a benefit. Once you procrastinate and then finish any task, you naturally can’t put in too much effort in completing any task. And the funny part is that since you know that you haven’t put in much effort in doing the task, you naturally won’t have expectations of the result.

This is similar to how those who study on the last day before the exams don’t expect good grades in the result. In fact, this is one of the prime examples of lowering your expectations by procrastinating, as those who only study on the last night before exams are technically procrastinating on revision.

6) It Increases Your Efficiency

This benefit of procrastination is connected to both of the previous points. If people procrastinate about the same task, again and again, their work speed increases but at the same time, they also learn how to get their work done with minimum effort as well. This is the very definition of efficiency – getting the result while decreasing the time and effort done to complete the work.

This is also somewhat related to our first benefit of procrastinating – it increases your creativity, as the more you procrastinate the same task, the more time you have to think about getting the work done as quickly as possible and with as little effort as possible to get – at the very least- a passing degree of work done. This is the exact thought process that goes into being efficient in any task. The only difference is, if you are a procrastinator, you are thinking this to get more time to slack off.

But…

This is where we are supposed to talk about the drawbacks of procrastinating. But we all know the drawbacks, don’t we? If we procrastinate, we can very well miss the deadline and get punished as a result. Besides that, there is also a risk of being lazy. But people who procrastinate know these things. So there is not much to talk about here besides saying that “it is indeed a bad habit to procrastinate”.

So,

The general gist is that as long as you manage to complete your work, it is not really a bad thing to procrastinate – as long as you know your limits. While it is indeed true that you won’t be able to do the work perfectly or gracefully after your procrastinate, once you get used to the whole flow of slacking off till the last moment, you can make your work present worthy. There are some benefits of procrastinating. It is just that to get these benefits, you might need to fail a few times which is not possible in a lot of cases.

Hope you found this enjoyable. If you have any suggestions for us, do let us know in the comments below. And as always, thank you for reading till the end.

Recommended Links