19 Unexpected Advantages Of Being A Procrastinator
In my humble opinion, procrastinators get an unfair reputation in society. From memoirs and biographies, it’s pretty clear that some of the greatest men and women that ever lived, were procrastinators. And in the words of a good friend of mine, “Procrastinating is for the efficient at heart.”
1. You will almost always be less stressed than everyone else. How? You know the 80/20 rule, right? Well, 80% of your stress will come from 20% of the actual time you spend doing what you should be doing. Because you spent the other 80% of your time avoiding it, but in an actively thoughtful manner.
2. You get to avoid most, if not all the mistakes of tragically overeager early doers. What can you say? Some people want to be first and some people want to be the best.
3. You have perfected the art of working smarter, not harder. Why anyone spends any more time than necessary doing anything is beyond you. There is so much other stuff you could be doing with your time…like not doing other things that have to get done later.
4. You know that while good things take time, great things happen when you are running against time, and the consequences of not getting it done on time are high. No high risk, no high reward!
5. Some people allow their worries to keep them up at night, and wake up tired. But you go to bed, sleep, and wake up early to finish that project that’s due first thing in the morning.
6. You make excellent decisions because they come after musing over an idea, and then making a decision at the eleventh hour. It’s the best of both worlds really – a lot of thought but still trusting your gut.
7. No one tries to burden you with any last-minute work knowing well that your last-minute work is reserved for your general work. No, last-minute work is reserved for the naïve souls who finish everything first.
8. You often solve problems by not thinking about the problem. While it seems like the human condition to focus on finding a solution to a problem by stressing one’s self out by focusing on the problem, you often forget about the problem altogether. While your subconscious mind works on finding a solution.
9. All things considered, you have excellent time management skills. Now just because you spend a great deal of time not immediately doing the thing that’s due, it doesn’t mean you are not doing other things.
10. You tend to be a little happier than everyone else. While there can be value to feeling stress-free when you get things done early, there is much more happiness that comes from accomplishing things just in time.
11. You’re never actually lazy, if you’re a good procrastinator. Because you’re either actively thinking about what you should be doing or doing it at the most optimum time to complete the task.
12. You know how to delegate tasks to other people in subtle ways. You firmly believe in letting the best person for the task do the task. Rather than doing the task simply because you were assigned the task.
13. You are more likely to be creative in getting things done. When putting things off, you come up with new and innovative ways to do things rather than doing what so many other have done before by following the status quo.
14. You’re less likely to waste time doing insignificant things when trying to complete a particular task because of the pending deadline. Nothing worse than spending your time doing things no one is going to need.
15. And the opposite of not wasting time doing insignificant things for the procrastinator, is spending most of your time doing the most important things in order to accomplish your goals.
16. You get to delay any negative emotions or experiences with doing something you don’t like by constraining it to the least amount of time possible. And you get to do this with relatively little backlash.
17. You do less of the things that you don’t want to do in general because much of the time, you find ways to not do it altogether. There is a lot of benefit to waiting and seeing if something really is worth doing.
18. You always make time for the things that matter to you in life. And if other things have to be put on hold, so be it. Life is what happens between getting things done anyway, right?
19. Your procrastination often leads to you just keeping things simple. And you know that beauty exists in doing the simple things well.
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