A sign posted in a friend's room reads, profanity-adjusted, "Procrastination is like masturbation. In the end, you're just [screwing] yourself." And yes, from a traditional Puritan work ethic standpoint, this is true. But times change. The '80s didn't just bring us a slew of Chevy Chase movies; they also brought us financial engineering, investment banking and good old-fashioned corporate greed. And upon the strong foundation of my Certificate in Sophistry, with the help of a bit of advanced microeconomics with calculus (worst idea ever), it is now possible to build a rational defense of procrastination. Hell, you're going to wish you'd spent an hour on thefacebook.com before reading this column — that's how right I am. Or how addictive the damned site is.
The most basic principle at work here is called "time value of money." The entire financial system of the world operates on the truth of instant gratification. If I gave you the choice between $10 now and $10 a year from now, you'd take it now, even if there were no such thing as interest. In fact, it is because of this principle that interest even exists. In general, having something good now is better than not having something good now. Catholicism has tried to counter this impulse by banning usury and sex before marriage. As Georges Clemenceau once said, though, "God has given us Ten Commandments, and we have broken them all. [Woodrow] Wilson [1879] gives us Fourteen Points; we shall see."
If money now is better than money later, what about time? Witty banter between Tom Hanks and a Cambodian drug lord named Chung Mee in the 1985 B-movie "Volunteers" sheds some light.
"Time is money!" yells the drug lord, pounding the table.
A smug, aristocratic Hanks smiles back and assures him that a certain bridge will be ready for opium trafficking very soon.
The drug lord, slightly placated, replies, "Good. Opium is money."
Hanks, faking confusion: "Wait, I thought you said time is money."
Chung, enraged: "Money is money!"
Hanks: "Ah, yes. Then what is opium again?"
We laugh. The meeting ends.
So if we construct a syllogism (let's call it "the time value of time"), we find time now is better than time later. If you have to choose between exploring the vast regions of eBaum's World now or later, you'd better do it now. Doing so after your paper is done is less valuable economically. Starting early on an assignment also invariably increases the amount of time you spend on it. From a grading standpoint, getting an A with a week's worth of work is better than getting a B after writing the paper in a few hours the night before. But from an investment standpoint, the procrastinator has achieved higher returns on his investment: He spent fewer hours and still did O.K. Assuming he passes (and trust me, it's a "he"), the guy who writes his paper the day it's due is truly beating the market.
The idea that slow and steady wins the race is a lie we tell to slow kids to make them be steady. Neil Young understood this: "It's better to burn out than to fade away / My my, hey hey." So I'm hereby putting you all on notice: Wednesday is the new Thursday. Tuesday nights on the Street have been pretty solid, too. To suggest otherwise would be to fly in the face of all of economics and logic. Who are you to disagree with Black-Scholes or Socrates? Similarly, don't you think you can get by in precept by doing only half the reading? Or maybe even just skimming the table of contents? Maximize your returns, dammit, or be crushed by the market! Listen to the laughter of the lovers as they run through the night, screaming up at your window while you question Kissinger's motives. They're laughing at you!
Make sure you don't procrastinate forever though. Again, we turn to the infallible wisdom of Chung Mee, who tells the preppie Hanks, "We must all do what we must do, for if we do not, then what we must do does not get done."
I'm off to start my J.P.
Powell Fraser is a politics major from Atlanta, Ga. He can be reached at pfraser@princeton.edu.Read More
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