Daisy Hessenberger outlines how she turned her procrastinating into time well-spent whilst writing her PhD thesis.

Contributor Daisy Hessenberger

Early in the fourth year of my PhD I went to a talk titled “The Power of Procrastination” by Dr Jorge Cham (here is a similar talk that Dr Cham did in Washington), the creator of PhD comics. Although intended as a comedy set, I also left with an important take home message: procrastination may not be that bad. Dr Cham argues that procrastination, especially in an academic setting, is undervalued and that we should endeavour to procrastinate more. His reasons for this are that great ideas are more likely to come during times of procrastination and that by procrastinating we are doing what we want to be doing with our life. Concentrating on the former process, I found that I agreed, remembering the countless times I had spent hours of intent focus on data analysis only for the answer to come to me while on my bike or illustrating for a student article.

Image credit: Jorge Cham

I was about to embark on writing my PhD dissertation, and though ideally my procrastination levels would drop as my workload increased, past experience told me that time spent procrastinating was proportionate to work load (see comic). So, I decided to be proactive and to actively plan in procrastination sessions in my writing process in the hope that my brain would yield enlightened ideas during this time, and that I would limit the time spent on useless procrastination. Continue reading →