Procrastination and Perfectionism and Creativity (or lack thereof)

I spend a LOT of time in my car, a 2011 Subaru with almost 290,000 miles. I do a LOT of thinking while driving. Much of what I think about is accompanied by the notion that "this is something I should write about."

The end result has been a LOT of thinking and NO writing: ZERO WRITING in almost a year, actually.

In the last couple of weeks, I have found myself referencing a famously quotable passage by Hunter S. Thompson regarding his use of writing to really, deeply-profoundly think about a subject.

That was my "eureka!" moment: I was thinking things through so thoroughly, doing mental rewrites to hone my cranial blogpost, that I was completing the process. The final rewrite was done.

Signed. Sealed. Delivered.

I was exhausting my material, setting it free from my thoughts. Not to be recalled, let alone written about at a later time and place when I was able to put pen to pad.

And then yesterday, I found out there is an actual psychological effect to explain this: The Zeigarnik Effect. In 1927 Bluma Zeigarnik conducted experiments about memory and the ability of people to remember incomplete tasks better than completed ones. She found that people were actually 90% more likely to remember the details of a task that was interrupted than one that was completed.

Adam Grant of the Wharton Business School has actually linked this forced procrastination, and procrastination in general to greater creativity. In fact he cites Da Vinci's 16-years to complete the Mona Lisa and the last minute edits to The Gettysburg Address and the "I Have a Dream" speech as proof positive of the benefits of procrastination.

(It is taking me forever to write this...)

Obviously there is a time and place for everything:
Defusing a bomb? Precrastination will serve you well. Trying to write the next Star Wars prequel for Jar-Jar Binks? Procrastination won't help with that, but procrastination may help you compose your first/next single, or land you an article in the New Yorker, or finish your next script for your television show.

"You call it procrastinating. I call it thinking."
- Aaron Sorkin