Why procrastination can help fuel creativity

The benefits of performing the undemanding task during the incubation were striking, with these participants showing a 40% rise in the creativity of their ideas for the questions they had previously considered. Importantly, there were no benefits for the participants who did nothing at all during the incubation, or those whose minds were more fully occupied with the working memory challenge; neither of these groups performed any better than students who had continued with the brainstorming task without an incubation period.

It may seem surprising that the pure rest period had not provoked greater creativity, but Baird suspects that we need some distraction to provoke the optimum amount of mind wandering. If we have literally nothing to do, our thoughts can become too logically sequential, he says (as you may think through one particular subject in detail). For creativity, what you really need is looser, less focused thinking – and that seems to come with slight engagement in an undemanding task.

Productive procrastination

That’s good news for procrastinators, since many of our ‘time-wasting’ activities may offer the optimal level of distraction for greater creativity. The key is to use distraction in moderation, as evidenced by a brand-new study from American management professors Jihae Shin and Adam Grant.

The researchers first asked the participants to brainstorm the best ways a student entrepreneur could spend $10,000 to start a new company, which they then had to write up into a business proposal. To tempt procrastination, the participants were also given links to funny YouTube videos from Jimmy Kimmel Live, which they could easily access during the exercise. The researchers then compared how much they procrastinated with the originality of their proposals.

The resulting graph looked something like an upside-down ‘U’. The people who took a few short breaks to watch the clips tended to come up with far more creative ideas than both the low- and high-procrastinators – supporting the idea that moderate levels of distraction can unleash innovative thinking.

Testing the principle in a working environment, Grant and Shin questioned the employees, and their supervisors, of a South Korean design company about their work habits and creative performance. In line with the results of the laboratory experiment, the moderate procrastinators came up with more original ideas than their colleagues who remained tightly focused on the day’s tasks.

How to waste time creatively

Whether you are a budding novelist, an advertising creative, a strategist or a teacher hoping to come up with more original lesson plans, these results are worth bearing in mind. Facing an impending deadline, we may fear taking any time away from the task at hand. But this will be counter-productive, and there should be no guilt about spending a few moments of pleasant distraction, or leaving the task altogether as we allow a solution to bubble to the surface.

Leaders may also take note. Rather than admonishing employees for taking time out of the working day, they should actively encourage it.

There are many ways they might do this. For example, Stanford researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz have found that walking boosts divergent thinking, providing fresh perspectives on whatever issues are occupying one’s mind. Interestingly the creativity-inducing effects of walking are similar whether it takes place indoors or outdoors. Leaders could therefore design workplace space that nudges employees to do more walking.

Apple’s new company headquarters, which opened in May 2017, may be the perfect example of this. Apple Park is circular and has a circumference of a mile and a diameter of 461m; it encompasses a 30-acre landscaped park where employees can wander when they are not walking to the café, the wellness centre or the theatre. As a bonus, this kind of layout promotes serendipitous encounters and conversations with colleagues, which could themselves act as a creative distraction, and which may also lead to exchange of complementary ideas and cross-fertilisation of research projects. Without issuing any explicit orders, the company is encouraging the adoption of behaviours that are known to increase creativity – a goal that was central to Steve Jobs’s vision of the park. And it seems to work: Apple is the most valuable company in the world at US$2 trillion and is regularly cited as the most innovative company in the world.

Not all companies can afford new office space, of course – and many employees are now working remotely. But managers can promote moderate procrastination in other ways, such as scheduling regular coffee breaks within meetings or even investing in nap pods, as seen in Google’s offices. (There is good evidence that short periods of sleep can also boost creativity when you are pondering a problem in much the same way as waking procrastination.) At the very least they should avoid chastising employees for the odd moment of distraction.

In the increasingly competitive workplace, we need innovative thinking more than ever before. But that will only be possible if we allow the conscious mind to find diversion and wander freely from time to time.

David Robson is the is author of The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions (Hodder & Stoughton/WW Norton).

Loizos Heracleous is a Professor of Strategy at Warwick Business School and an Associate Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Janus Strategy.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210319-why-procrastination-can-help-fuel-creativity