Do You Need the P Team?
A Couple of Definitions
Procrastination is to voluntarily delay an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay.
Piers Steel (2007)
Procrastination is the bad habit of putting off until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.
Napoleon Hill (1883-1970)
Do you leave jobs until the last minute? Do you never get around to finishing some tasks? Do you wonder whether there are hidden forces screwing with your plans? If the answer is "yes" to any of these questions, then you need to know about the Procrash Team.
Meet Gorilla, Monkey and Sloth, agents of procrastination. In the next set of posts, we will explore the specialist skills of each member of the team and how they work together to ensure things don't go to plan. So don't delay!
You can find out more about the origins of the P Team from the Discovery Journey.
Precrastination versus Procrastination
There is sometimes no downside to waiting and, using the first definition above, this is not procrastination. In fact doing things too early could be detrimental and this is called precrastination*.
Here's an example. If you have a plane to catch and it's leaving at 10am and you are advised to check-in at 9am and it's an hour's drive to the airport. If you leave at 3am then that's a clear case of precrastination (unless you only travel for the duty free). If you leave at 7:30am allowing yourself one and half hour's drive then that would be sensible. If you leave at 8am allowing no contingency then that would be procrastinating. If you leave at 9am on the assumption that your ride can bend time and space to get you there before you left, then that would be irrational optimism.
* an asterisk at the end of a link means that if you click this link you will be taken to another site.