Imagine That! 2

Why did homo sapiens survive? The brain theory folks, summed up here by Cal Newport, connect survive-ability to procrastination:

Rewind time 100,000 years ago: several different species of humans co-exist on earth.There was, of course, our own species, Homo sapien, but we were joined by our more athletic siblings from the Tree of Life, Homo erectus, who had left Africa and colonized Asia long before we ventured beyond the mother continent, all the while another sibling, the stocky Neanderthal, was hunkered down in a European ice age.

Advance another 90,000 years, however, and our species is the only game left in town.

Scientists have worked hard to figure out why we survived while other early humans did not. The answer to this question lies at the core of our species’ story, but it also provides insight into a topic of significantly less importance on the grand scale, but nonetheless one that haunts many of us in our everyday lives: procrastination.

The Planning Edge

“The most obvious answer [to the question of Homo sapiens’ survival] is that we had bigger brains,” explains paleoanthropologist John Shea, in a recent article from BBC News. “But it turns out that what matters is not overall brain size but the areas where the brain is larger…one of the crucial elements of Homo sapiens’ adaptations is…complex planning.”

Complex planning is a subtle skill: it requires you to both conceive of future steps and evaluate whether these steps are a good idea.

We suffer from procrastination at all ages, but in this post I want to focus on students, as it’s the group whose work habits I understand the best. Professionals give lots of reason for student procrastination. Here are three examples from a representative university web site on the topic:

1. Fear (of both success and failure).
2. Perfectionism.
3. We think our work is of low quality.

I’m sure these can all play a role in procrastination, but in my experience there’s a fourth reason that’s significantly more common: your brain doesn’t buy your plan….

If this explanation is true, then you would also expect that students with smart study habits to struggle less with procrastination. This is exactly what I observed when I studied elite undergrads for my red book: only a small minority of the fifty hyper-organized students I interviewed reported procrastination as a serious problem.

In this telling, procrastination is not a character flaw but instead a finely-tuned evolutionary adaptation. You shouldn’t lament procrastination, but instead listen to it. Treat it as a sign that your skills as a student need more work.

This perspective also helps us cope with procrastination beyond graduation. Why do we delay on ambitious projects that could change our life for the better? The common explanation from the blogosphere is because we’re afraid of failure and lack courage.

The evolutionary perspective on procrastination, by contrast, says we delay because our frontal lobe doesn’t see a convincing plan behind our aspiration. The solution, therefore, is not to muster the courage to blindly charge ahead, but to instead accept what our brain is telling us: our plans need more hard work invested before they’re ready.

These topics are deep and I hope to address them in more detail in the near future (this post is the first of a several in short summer series I have planned). For now, I want to leave you with the general idea that procrastination is not your enemy. It is instead a constructive source of criticism — a voice from our paleolithic past telling us that although it likes our goals, we need to put a little bit more thought into how we’re going to get there.

If this warning system was good enough to prevent mammoth trampling, it’s certainly good enough to help you finish your term paper without pulling an all-nighter.