How to Use Delay and Deliberate Procrastination as a Decision Making Tool
Frank Partnoy on the value of reflection and incubation over reactivity and haste.
Illustration of Frank Partnoy by Mariya Suzuki
“Life might be a race against time, but it is enriched when we rise above our instincts and stop the clock to process and understand what we are doing and why. A wise decision requires reflection, and reflection requires pause.”
Most of us have heard the saying “never put off until tomorrow what you can do today,” often attributed to Benjamin Franklin. We associate discipline and productivity with not deferring decisions or leaving things until the last minute.
There is definitely a lot of wisdom and truth in this. But in some cases, delay and procrastination might actually be the better route to success. They prevent us from half-baked snap decisions and reactivity.
Let’s look at the 2008 financial crisis. Lehman, explains Frank Partnoy, had just created a decision-making course:
“They had tried to understand the details of their own decision making. They had brought in famous psychologists. They had custom-designed, implicit association tests to look at their own biases. They had brought in Malcolm Gladwell, who had just published Blink. And the president of Lehman, Joe Gregory, was distributing copies of Blink on the trading floor. And they had this course. […] And then they marched right back to their headquarters in Times Square and proceeded to make the worst snap decisions in financial market history.”
Lehman Brothers clearly put a lot of thought into decision-making. But did they focus on the wrong lessons?
Partnoy thinks they did, and he knows a bit about the world of finance. Not only is he Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, but he also used to be an investment banker and derivatives trader — professions that are notorious for being always busy and making decisions as quickly as possible.
His experience in this world has taught him that “today, the Lehman’s of the world should be taking a very different course.” Looking at “how banks were collapsing and had made such spectacularly bad decisions [and] how regulators came in and made equally bad snap decisions,” he decided to take a step back to research the decision-making process itself. This research ultimately led him to write Wait — The Art and Science of Delay.
In Wait, Partnoy argues for a completely different approach, one that on the surface goes largely against common wisdom. He sees the key to good decision making in delay and waiting.
“For centuries, leading thinkers […] have told us not to jump to firm conclusions about the unknown. Yet today, we jump faster and more frequently to firm conclusions. We like to believe there is wisdom in our snap decisions, and sometimes there is. But true wisdom and judgment come from understanding our limitations when it comes to thinking about the future.”
He even sees the act of delay —our ability to not be reactive and instead postpone decisions — as a core part of our human existence.
“Questions about delay are existential: the amount of time we take to reflect on decisions will define who we are.”
Delayed gratification, deliberation, and reflection all help us not default to the fastest idea, but find the best one. If you are not facing a crisis, it is better to discover the right idea instead of forcing out an idea right now.
Particularly the rise of modern technology and constant connectivity have driven us to a world where “faster is better” and responses should be immediate. But Partnoy argues that delaying and leaving time for consideration is often the better choice.
“The essence of my case is this: given the fast pace of modern life, most of us tend to react too quickly. We don’t, or can’t, take enough time to think about the increasingly complex timing challenges we face. Technology surrounds us, speeding us up. We feel its crush every day, both at work and at home. Yet the best time managers are comfortable pausing for as long as necessary before they act, even in the face of the most pressing decisions. Some seem to slow down time. For good decision-makers, time is more flexible than a metronome or atomic clock.”
Partnoy urges us to embrace procrastination and delay.
And our contempt for procrastination is an entirely modern attitude.
Not only was it not a vice, it was actually “regarded as an important quality to have. Procrastination was associated with wisdom.” Partnoy sees the decline of its reputation in something we closely look at in the opening chapter of our book Time Off, the rise of Puritan values in the 1700s. Suddenly, and lasting up to this day, we associated procrastination with feelings of shame and guilt.
To counter this, Partnoy suggests that if we’re facing an important decision, we should follow a two-step process. First, figure out what would be the latest possible time to make the decision, the longest time you have available until you need to respond. Then use that time — all of it — and decide or respond at the last moment.
The longer the pause, the more time our brain has to process and make new associations. Delay becomes incubation time in our creative process.
Delaying, Partnoy argues, leads to an overall slowdown of the world around us. As an example, if we respond immediately to every single email and message, new emails and messages will come in faster and faster. If you delay your responses, people and the world around you will also slow down and give you more room to breathe.
Partnoy also references studies on the world’s top tennis players.
But before you now use this as an excuse to just mindlessly procrastinate, we should mention that not all procrastination is created equal.
We all delay things at certain points, but few of us ever consciously think about the right amount of delay. “If you’re just being lazy in your decisions, personal or professional, that’s a bad thing,” says Partnoy.
The procrastination and delay he recommends should be deliberate decisions, not just defaulting to the path of least effort. If embraced and perfected, delay becomes a crucial part of your creative process. Leaving the actual decision to the end leaves more time to prepare and plan.
“Our ability to think about delay is a central part of the human condition. It is a gift, a tool we can use to examine our lives.”
Let’s accept this gift and use it to make better decisions.
Practice: Learn the art of effective delaying
With your next big decision or task, ask yourself this deliberate question: “What is the longest amount of time I can delay before doing this?” Then fully use this time, both for directly working on the task, but also for good procrastination and allowing your subconscious to incubate on it. In the words of Partnoy, “delay the response or the decision until the very last possible moment. If it is a year, wait 364 days. If it’s an hour, wait 59 minutes.”
This article was part of an early draft of Time Off: A Practical Guide to Building Your Rest Ethic and Finding Success Without the Stress by John Fitch and Max Frenzel, with illustrations by Mariya Suzuki, but did not make it through the final editing process. If you enjoyed this article, we are sure you’ll love the book as well.