The Power Of Procrastination

When I was in high school, my mother came up with an annoying but apt pet name for me: my little procrastinator. What's more irksome is that the name has stuck. I am still a procrastinator. If we didn't have deadlines here at C&EN, I would never get anything done.

So when I found out Jorge Cham was coming to my alma mater to give a talk called "The Power of Procrastination," I cleared my calendar and readied my notebook. Cham is an engineering instructor at California Institute of Technology who has developed a cult following among graduate students as the creator of "Piled Higher and Deeper," or PhD, a comic strip "about life (or the lack thereof) in grad school."

The strip itself is the fruit of procrastination, Cham admits. "If I'm ever going to be remembered for anything, it's not going to be for my research or my publications," he says. "It's going to be for what I was doing instead of my research and my publications."

Cham dreamed up PhD in an effort to put off working on his dissertation during his days as a mechanical engineering graduate student at Stanford. In 1997, Cham began putting these illustrations of graduate student life online and, judging from the reader responses on the PhD Comics website, struck a nerve with graduate students around the world.

"Your comic strip makes me feel that I am not alone and there are others suffering through the penniless ignominy that is grad school," writes one chemical engineering student from the University of Houston. "I can't tell whether I should be laughing or crying in sympathy," adds a chemistry student from Caltech.

The search for free food, stressful interactions with one's thesis adviser, and the peaks and valleys of scholarly motivation are among the graduate struggles Cham documents through archetypal graduate school characters like Mike Slackenerny, "who's been in graduate school longer than anyone can remember."

Last year, Cham published his second collection of PhD strips, "Life is Tough and Then You Graduate." He spent the 2005-06 academic year visiting universities across the U.S. and Canada promoting the book, commiserating with graduate students, and preaching the power of procrastination.

For those who have never experienced, or who have forgotten, impoverished graduate student life, Cham has some illuminating figures. The average graduate student stipend is $14,055. The salary of someone working at McDonalds in California is $14,040. "There's a lot you can do with that extra cash," he jokes of the $15 disparity. "Buy a CD or something. Maybe a case of ramen noodles."

He also notes that a graduate student survey at the University of California, Berkeley, revealed that 95% of graduate students have felt overwhelmed at some point in their graduate careers. "I don't know who the other 5% are," Cham quips. More than 67% have felt hopeless or seriously depressed; 10% have considered suicide; and one in 200 has attempted it.

Cham says that he too got the grad school blues. But when he realized it was OK to procrastinate, he reached a turning point in his career. "I actually had a sort of positive experience in grad school," he tells C&EN.

Procrastination, Cham says, should not be confused with laziness, which is when you don't want to do anything. "Procrastination is when you just don't want to do it now."

It's easy to see procrastination as a bad thing, something you do when you should be doing something else. Cham sees it differently. Embracing procrastination, he says, can help restore your motivation. Cham admits he now procrastinates working on PhD Comics by doing research.

Or, like Cham, procrastination can lead you down a different path entirely. He points out that Albert Einstein procrastinated his work at the patent office by coming up with the theory of relativity. Isaac Asimov procrastinated his studies in chemistry by writing. "The two guys that founded Yahoo, their adviser went on sabbatical," or so the story goes, Cham says. "So one said to the other, 'Hey, we've got some time. Let's try to categorize the Internet!' That's legendary procrastination."

Cham concludes that "procrastination is what you do when you're doing what you want to be doing." How bad can that be?

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS.