The benefits of procrastination show up when a chosen wait improves the intended task: an idea incubates, a missing fact arrives, or a rushed first draft dies. That is not the same as doing other useful work to avoid the priority, and it is not a free pass. Most delay still costs grades, stress, and efficiency.
Key takeaways
- Jihae Shin and Adam Grant (2021) found an inverted-U: in a 119-person US lab study, a moderate wait produced more creative business proposals than starting at once (d = .74) or waiting until the end (d = .73).
- The same paper’s field sample of 170 employees at a South Korean furniture firm showed the inverted-U on supervisor-rated creativity, and only when intrinsic motivation or creative requirement was high — while more delay still predicted lower task efficiency.
- Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod’s 2009 meta-analysis found a positive incubation effect, larger for divergent thinking, stronger after a longer first attempt, and weaker when the break was filled with a high-demand task.
- Piers Steel’s 2007 review still defines procrastination as voluntarily delaying an intended action while expecting to be worse off — so a delay that you already know will cost you is not a benefit you get to rename.
- Dianne Tice and Roy Baumeister (1997) found the early-term calm of putting work off reversed later: more stress, more illness reports, and worse grades by the end of the term.
What the benefits of procrastination actually are
The benefits of procrastination are the rare cases where a chosen wait makes the intended task better — not the everyday habit of putting the intended task off. That sentence has to do two jobs at once, because the search query is generous and the evidence is not. People type “benefits of procrastination” hoping the stall has a secret upside. A few upsides exist. They are narrower than the hope, and they sit next to a much larger pile of costs.
Piers Steel’s 2007 meta-analytic review is the boundary, not the villain of this page. He defined procrastination as voluntarily delaying an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay. If that sentence describes what you are doing, you are not collecting a hidden dividend. You are paying a bill on an installment plan. The useful version of delay fails that definition on purpose: you step away because you expect the work to get better, and you can say why.
Three waits clear that bar often enough to write about. Incubation: you made a real first attempt, then set the problem down so a less obvious structure can show up. Information: one named input is missing, and starting the polished draft now would just be fiction. Selection: the first idea is too available, and a short gap keeps you from seizing and freezing on it. Jihae Shin and Adam Grant’s 2021 Academy of Management Journal paper is the cleanest modern test of that third wait on creative work. Everything else — inbox zero, a sudden urge to reorganise the desk, a third “quick” research tab — is a different mechanism, and most of it still belongs on how to overcome procrastination.
This is also not a health page. Depletion, dread, and a collapse of want-to across a whole week are not diagnosed here and are not treated here. The question is smaller and more practical: did the delay change the intended task, or did it only postpone it?
How is this different from productive procrastination?
Productive procrastination is doing Task B so the avoidance still looks busy; a useful delay is a wait that is supposed to improve Task A. The live sister page on productive procrastination owns the first pattern — answering email, tidying a shelf, prepping tomorrow’s slides while the priority stays untouched. That sister is honest about the leftover: the intended task is still late. This page owns the second pattern. If the proposal gets a better structure because you walked after a messy first outline, the wait was for the proposal. If the proposal waits because the kitchen needed wiping, you have left this page.
Katrin Klingsieck’s 2013 review is useful language for the split. She treats strategic delay as a planned postponement with a reason, and procrastination as the self-regulatory failure Steel described. The two can share a calendar block and still be different acts. The test is not how virtuous the other activity was. The test is whether the intended task was the thing you were trying to improve.
Why a wait can improve the work
A moderate wait can improve creative work because it gives the first framing time to loosen, and it can starve a last-minute panic that narrows attention. Shin and Grant start from incubation theory, not from a pep talk about “trusting the process.” If you begin the moment the brief lands, you are likely to grab the most available idea and then defend it. If you wait until the deadline is a cliff, time pressure shields the goal and shuts out the odd connection you needed. The middle is the only place those two failures are both smaller.
Their Study 1 put 119 US undergraduates on a 30-minute business-proposal task and tempted them with funny videos. Everyone had access to the same nine clips; the difference was how many sat on the page (one, four, or eight). The moderate group watched longer than the low-delay group and shorter than the high-delay group, and raters who did not know the conditions scored the moderate proposals as more creative (M = 4.48 vs 3.21 and 3.36 on a 7-point scale). Study 2 replicated the inverted-U and found it was partly carried by problem restructuring and the activation of new knowledge — the incubation story, measured rather than assumed.
Study 3 took the pattern out of the lab. One hundred and seventy employees at a South Korean furniture firm, plus their supervisors, produced the same inverted-U on creativity ratings, and a straight cost on efficiency: more delay, less throughput. The creativity bump also needed a motive. It showed up when people were intrinsically interested or when the job actually required novel ideas. A delay on a filing task is not a creativity intervention. It is a late file.
Sio and Ormerod’s 2009 meta-analysis is the older, broader version of the same mechanism. Across 117 incubation studies they found a positive effect. Divergent thinking gained more than linguistic or visual insight tasks. A longer preparation period — meaning you actually worked the problem first — increased the gain. A high-demand task in the gap reduced it. Benjamin Baird, Jonathan Smallwood, Michael Mrazek, Julia Kam, Michael Franklin and Jonathan Schooler (2012) later showed a compatible lab detail: an undemanding interpolated task beat rest and beat a demanding task on a later Unusual Uses Test. The useful break is not “more work” and it is not a nap you have not earned. It is a low-load gap after a real attempt.
The three waits that can pay
Only three waits are worth designing on purpose: steep, gather, and test. Everything else is a stall wearing a nicer verb.
- Steep — incubation after a first try. Write the ugly outline. Then walk, wash a mug, or do something that does not need the same verbal channel. Sio and Ormerod’s moderators are the rules: you need preparation time, and you should not fill the gap with another hard problem. Come back to the same draft, not a new one.
- Gather — one missing fact, named in advance. “I cannot write the pricing paragraph until finance sends the number” is a wait with an input. “I should read a bit more” is a research spiral. The return trigger is the fact, or a clock if the fact does not arrive. An open loop is how gather turns into stall.
- Test — kill the first idea on purpose. Shin and Grant’s moderate condition is the closest experimental picture: enough distance that the obvious pitch can die, not so much distance that panic writes the second draft. This wait only pays on work that needs a novel, useful idea. It does not pay on a form you already know how to fill.
Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity is the book-length version of load, not of incubation. Do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality. The overlap with this page is the refusal to treat every hour as a throughput contest. The non-overlap is important: Newport is arguing for a smaller queue, not for putting the same overloaded queue off until Thursday. If your calendar is still a pile, a “creative wait” is usually just the pile winning. The productivity library is where that slower pace sits next to the start-now pages, instead of replacing them.
Why the benefit costs more than it feels like
The early calm of putting work off is real, and it is a terrible accountant. Tice and Baumeister’s 1997 longitudinal study is the honest mood data. Students who procrastinated felt better early in the term. By the end they reported more stress, more illness, and they had worse grades. The benefit you can feel at the start of the delay is the part the paper does not let you keep.
Steel’s 2007 review is the other half of the bill. Across hundreds of effects, procrastination tracked with task aversiveness (a correlation around .40), with weaker executive follow-through, and with worse performance. That is not a creativity paper, and it should not be quoted as if it were. It is the base rate. Most intended actions that get delayed were delayed because they were unpleasant, not because they needed to incubate. If you use Shin and Grant as a blanket pardon, you are sampling on the one outcome (originality) that sometimes rises, and ignoring the efficiency drop the same authors measured in the field.
Angela Hsin Chun Chu and Jin Nam Choi (2005), and Choi and Sarah Moran (2009), described “active procrastinators” who say they prefer time pressure and still meet deadlines. Treat that as a self-report cluster, not as a performance guarantee. The items describe a preference. They do not show that last-minute work produced better output than a moderate wait, and they sit awkwardly next to Shin and Grant’s high-delay condition, which was the wrong end of the inverted-U.
Two honest caveats. Shin and Grant’s lab task is a 30-minute proposal with YouTube sitting on the page — a clean manipulation, not a week of a real job. The field study is one furniture company and supervisor ratings of everyday creativity, not patents. Sio and Ormerod’s meta-analysis pools lab incubation tasks; it does not prove that “I’ll start the strategy deck on Friday” is an incubation protocol. Observational comfort with delay is not causal proof that delay made the work better.
How to use a delay without sliding into a stall
Write the intended output, name the kind of wait, and set the return before you stand up. This play page does not ship a numbered step ladder. It still needs a way to keep the wait from renaming itself. Four checks are enough, and none of them require a new app.
Name the task in one sentence. “Draft the pricing section, 250 words, ugly is fine.” If you cannot name it, you are not incubating it. You are leaving a fog. The sentence is also what you return to, so the wait has a door.
Name the wait. Steep, gather, or test. If you cannot pick one, you do not have a benefit. You have a flinch. Gather needs a named input. Test needs a first idea already on the page. Steep needs a first attempt that was actually attempted.
Set the return. A clock, or the arrival of the one fact. An open loop is how Sophie Leroy’s attention residue — leftover Task A in the next hour — gets invited in. You do not need her full protocol here; you need to refuse an unbounded pause. Ninety minutes is a wait. “Later” is a stall.
Protect the return. Come back to Task A. If you come back to a different useful task, you have crossed onto productive procrastination. That can still be a decent hour. It is not the benefit this page is selling. How to overcome procrastination is the parent if the return keeps losing.
| Move | What you can point to | What it is not |
|---|---|---|
| Steep | A first attempt exists; the gap is low-load; you return to the same draft | A second hard project, or a break before you have tried |
| Gather | One named input, and a clock if it does not arrive | Open-ended research, a fourth source, “just in case” |
| Test | The first idea is already written; the wait is short; the job needs a novel answer | A form, a filing task, or waiting until the night before |
| Stall | The intended task is unchanged, and you expected that | A benefit. Steel’s definition already has this case |
Common mistakes
- Calling every stall a benefit. If you already expect to be worse off, Steel’s definition has you. Originality data from one lab task does not overwrite that.
- Waiting with no first try. Sio and Ormerod’s larger incubation effects sat on longer preparation. A blank page cannot incubate a structure it has never held.
- Filling the gap with another hard problem. High-demand interpolated work shrank incubation. The useful gap is low-load, not a second brief.
- Using last-minute as a personality. Tice and Baumeister’s late-term reversal is the cost of that identity. Shin and Grant’s high-delay arm is the creativity cost.
- Confusing this page with productive procrastination. Other useful work is a different article. Link across; do not merge the keywords.
- Treating efficiency and creativity as the same score. The field study raised (some) originality and still cut throughput. A manager can like the idea and still need the file.
- Borrowing a health story. Exhaustion and dread are real. They are not diagnosed or treated here, and they are not solved by renaming a stall as incubation.
When it is more than a useful delay
A useful delay has a named return; a pattern that never returns is not this page. If the same intended task has been “incubating” for a month, you do not have a Shin-and-Grant effect. You have an open loop. How to overcome procrastination, the eat-the-frog method, and the procrastination-cycle page are the start-now cluster. This article should not be the one you reread to feel better about the pile.
If the delay is sitting on top of persistent exhaustion, a loss of interest across work and rest, or a drop in function that does not move when the deadline moves, that is a different layer. This article does not diagnose it and does not treat it. A qualified professional is the right next step for that layer. The productivity question stays the same and smaller: did the wait change the intended task?
The evidence behind this
The benefit is a middle-of-the-range creativity effect with hard boundary conditions; the cost is the default. Read the table as a set of designs, not as a single score.
| Study | Design and size | Finding | What we used it for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shin & Grant (2021), Study 1 | Lab experiment, 119 US undergraduates; 1 vs 4 vs 8 videos on the page; 30-minute proposal; two blinded raters (ICC2 = .94) | Moderate delay more creative than low (d = .74) and high (d = .73); time-on-videos rose across conditions as intended | The inverted-U on creative output, not on speed |
| Shin & Grant (2021), Study 3 | Field survey, 170 employees and supervisors at one South Korean furniture firm | Inverted-U on supervisor-rated creativity when motivation or creative requirement was high; more delay, less efficiency | Boundary conditions, and the efficiency cost |
| Sio & Ormerod (2009) | Meta-analysis of 117 incubation studies | Positive incubation effect; larger for divergent tasks; longer preparation helps; high-demand gaps hurt | When a break is an incubation protocol |
| Baird et al. (2012) | Lab, Unusual Uses Test after undemanding vs demanding interpolated work vs rest | Undemanding gap beat rest and beat a demanding gap on later uses | Low-load breaks, not a second hard task |
| Steel (2007) | Meta-analytic review of procrastination as self-regulatory failure | Delay of an intended action while expecting to be worse off; aversiveness around r = .40 | The definition that keeps “benefit” from swallowing every stall |
| Tice & Baumeister (1997) | Longitudinal student sample across a term | Lower early stress; later, more stress, more illness reports, worse grades | Why the early calm is a bad ledger |
| Chu & Choi (2005); Choi & Moran (2009) | Self-report scales of “active” vs passive procrastination | A cluster of people who say they prefer pressure and still meet deadlines | A preference sketch — not treated as a performance trial |
| Klingsieck (2013) | Conceptual review | Strategic delay ≠ procrastination | Language for the split this page needs |
Frequently asked questions
What are the benefits of procrastination?
The benefits of procrastination show up when a chosen wait improves the intended task: an idea incubates after a real first try, one named fact arrives, or a rushed first draft dies before you lock it. Jihae Shin and Adam Grant found an inverted-U on creativity — moderate delay beat starting at once and beat last-minute work — while efficiency still fell as delay rose. That is a work-quality finding, not a free pass to stall. Avoidance that never returns to the intended task still matches Piers Steel’s costly delay.
Is procrastination actually good for creativity?
Sometimes, and only in the middle of the range. In Shin and Grant’s first US lab study (119 undergraduates), people tempted into a moderate wait wrote more creative business proposals than the low-delay and high-delay groups (pairwise d = .74 and .73). A field sample of 170 employees at a South Korean furniture firm showed the same inverted-U on supervisor-rated creativity, and only when intrinsic motivation or creative requirement was high. High delay did not help. Throughput still suffered. Creativity is not a licence to miss the deadline.
How is this different from productive procrastination?
Productive procrastination is doing a different useful task so the avoidance still produces visible work. The benefit on this page is a wait that is supposed to improve the original task — incubation, one missing input, or killing the first idea. If you left the proposal to tidy a shelf, you are on the sister page. If you left the proposal so the problem could restructure, you are here. Both can look like delay from the outside. Only one is trying to make Task A better.
Does a break always count as incubation?
No. Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod’s 2009 meta-analysis found a positive incubation effect, larger on divergent thinking than on linguistic or visual insight tasks. Longer preparation before the break helped. Filling the break with a high-demand task shrank the effect. A walk after a real first attempt is in range. Opening a hard second project, or stepping away before you have tried, is not the condition those studies measured. Incubation is a designed pause, not a mood.
Why do I feel better when I put the work off?
Dianne Tice and Roy Baumeister tracked students across a term in 1997. Procrastinators reported less stress early, then more stress, more illness, and worse grades later. The early calm is real. It is also the cheap part of the bill. Steel’s 2007 review treats the pattern as a self-regulatory failure: you delay an intended action while expecting to be worse off. Feeling lighter at 11 a.m. does not mean the delay paid. It often means the cost has not arrived yet.
Can I plan to work best under pressure?
You can prefer pressure. That preference is not evidence that last-minute work is better. Shin and Grant’s high-delay condition produced less creative proposals than the moderate wait, and more delay predicted lower task efficiency in the field. Tice and Baumeister’s late-term costs run the same way. Angela Chu and Jin Nam Choi’s “active procrastination” work is self-report about people who say they like time pressure — useful as a personality sketch, not as a performance trial. A named return time is safer than a style identity.
When should I just start?
Start when the task is execution, not idea generation; when you have not yet made a first attempt; when the wait has no named input; or when last week’s “wait” never returned. Steel’s definition is the filter: if you expect to be worse off and you are still delaying, you are not collecting a benefit. Eat the frog and how to overcome procrastination are the start pages. This page is only for the cases where a short, designed pause can change the work you already began.
Is this a medical or burnout page?
No. This is a productivity page about motivation versus a chosen wait at work. It does not diagnose burnout, depression, or any clinical condition, and it does not list treatments or symptoms. Persistent exhaustion, anhedonia, or a collapse of function across contexts is a different layer — take that to a qualified professional. The question here is narrower: did the delay improve the intended task, or did it only postpone it?
Sources
- Shin, J., & Grant, A. M. (2021). When putting work off pays off: The curvilinear relationship between procrastination and creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 64(3), 772–798. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2018.1471
- Sio, U. N., & Ormerod, T. C. (2009). Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 94–120. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014212
- Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65
- Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Longitudinal study of procrastination, performance, stress, and health: The costs and benefits of dawdling. Psychological Science, 8(6), 454–458. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00460.x
- Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W. Y., Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2012). Inspired by distraction: Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1117–1122. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612446024
- Chu, A. H. C., & Choi, J. N. (2005). Rethinking procrastination: Positive effects of “active” procrastination behavior on attitudes and performance. The Journal of Social Psychology, 145(3), 245–264. https://doi.org/10.3200/SOCP.145.3.245-264
- Choi, J. N., & Moran, S. V. (2009). Why not procrastinate? Development and validation of a new active procrastination measure. The Journal of Social Psychology, 149(2), 195–211. https://doi.org/10.3200/SOCP.149.2.195-211
- Klingsieck, K. B. (2013). Procrastination: When good things don’t come to those who wait. European Psychologist, 18(1), 24–34. https://doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040/a000138
Related reading on The Growth Reads
The books behind this
- Slow Productivity summary & review — Cal Newport on doing fewer things, at a natural pace, without treating every hour as a throughput contest
Related articles
- How to overcome procrastination — the parent page: start-now, not this wait
- Productive procrastination — Task B while Task A waits; a different keyword
- What is the opposite of procrastination — the start / precrastination neighbour
- Procrastination cycle — the loop when the wait never returns
- Eat the frog method — when the next move is the hard thing first
Go deeper
How this article was researched
The Growth Reads editorial team writes from primary sources: the books themselves and the peer-reviewed literature behind the claims. Shin and Grant’s two US lab experiments and the 170-person Korean field study, Sio and Ormerod’s incubation meta-analysis, Steel’s 2007 review, Tice and Baumeister’s term-long student study, Baird and colleagues’ Unusual Uses interpolation study, Chu and Choi’s and Choi and Moran’s active-procrastination scales, and Klingsieck’s conceptual split were checked against the original papers or their published abstracts and are quoted with design and, where the source supports it, the direction or size of the effect. Percentages the papers do not state as headline effects are not invented here. Shin and Grant (2021) is a 30-minute lab proposal plus one-company supervisor ratings — useful for the inverted-U, not a personal KPI. Sio and Ormerod (2009) pools lab incubation tasks. Steel (2007) is the base-rate definition, not a creativity trial. Tice and Baumeister (1997) is a student term, not a workplace year. Chu and Choi / Choi and Moran are flagged as self-report preference, not performance. Newport’s Slow Productivity is cited as language for load and pace, not as a trial of delay.
This article contains no medical advice and no diagnosis. Nothing above should be read as a claim that delay treats burnout, depression, or any clinical condition, or that a wait is a substitute for starting an intended task you already expect to be worse off for delaying.
How we work: every article on The Growth Reads is built from the books in our library plus the research they rest on, and is reviewed and date-stamped when the evidence changes. Read our full methodology.