Are you the kind of person who leaves things to the last minute?

I love leaving some things to the last minute. Packing* is a great example. I feel that if I have 1 hour to pack the car for a weekend camping trip, then I’ll only take an hour. If I start packing three days before… it’ll take three days. 

I often do this with work too. My wife thinks I’m crazy leaving large tasks to two or three hours before the deadline. For her, that would cause extreme stress. For me, it causes eustress. That is, just the right amount of pressure to get me hyper focussed and power it out. 

But wait, isn’t leaving things to the last minute just procrastination? And isn’t procrastination bad?

Well, it turns out that procrastination isn’t all bad. As with many things, it depends how you do it. 

An excellent paper by Fred Paas and colleagues highlights the difference between two types of procrastination, passive procrastination and active procrastination. 

Passive procrastination results from an indecision to act; it’s the unconscious delay of a task. In contrast, active procrastination is making the deliberate decision to delay the start of a task to create work pressure. 

Here’s an excerpt from the paper:

'The analysis includes 96 articles with 176 coefficients, including a combined average of 55,477 participants related to the correlation between academic performance and procrastination. The analysis uncovered a modest negative correlation between academic performance and procrastination overall. Importantly, the type of procrastination exerted a substantial impact on the strength of this correlation: active procrastination demonstrated a small positive effect size, whereas passive procrastination registered a small negative effect size'

So if you’ve been beating yourself up by leaving things to the last minute, maybe you don’t have to. Maybe you should just own it and tell yourself that you’re actively procrastinating, which is associated with increased performance!

Don’t forget to leave it to the last minute!

*Tasks come in different categories. If I’m packing for a weekend away, it’s low stakes if I forget something, so I do it quickly and I have a list of the 10 or so things that it really matters if I forget. If I’m packing for a week-long trip in the wilderness where I need to be completely self-sustaining, that isn’t a last minute job. User discretion advised. Consider the stakes of your task prior to pursuing active procrastination!

Announcements and Opportunities: Four things from Steplab

It's action stations at Steplab. Here are four ways to be part of the evidence informed Instructional Coaching movement in Australia!

Intensives: We're running four different full-day Instructional Coaching Intensives between now and the end of 2024. They'll be in Perth (Oct 21st), Sydney (Oct 28th), Adelaide (Nov 11th), and Melbourne (Nov 13th) . Come along for an unforgettable crash course in Instructional Coaching with yours truly and Rory McCaughey!

Certificate in Coaching Leadership: Following a hugely successful cohort 1, we've just opened applications for cohort 2 of our year-long CCL program. Watch the video then find out more about this transformative opportunity and apply here. Here’s the vid again, for your convenience:

Teach Like a Champion now on Steplab: You heard it right, Steplab has partnered with Doug Lemov and the Teach Like a Champion team! Now you can find all the Teach Like a Champion content converted into bite-sized action Steps for use in your coaching program in your school. Find out more.

Come work at Steplab! Steplab Aus is growing fast, so we're hiring for an operations and admin team member :) Apply here (applications close midnight Monday Sep 23rd), or send any questions to [email protected]

I hope to see you at one of our events soon.