The thing of legends, a staple breakfast for underachievers. A sure-fire recipe for failure. Or is it?
1. The OCD Perfectionist
Well, perhaps not a recipe for failure but most definitely one for mediocrity. But how so? Procrastinating means that you lose time to perfect a product, add on the bells and whistles...so to speak. When you eventually decide to be productive, the time left to execute is not enough to pull a rabbit out of the hat.
As an avid procrastinator myself, I get a lot more jolt out of myself when I know that the bell-ringing is eminent. This has a way of instilling certainty and direction into your perfectionist and obsessive detail junkie, who would otherwise stutter and at times be paralized by trying to be too rational. Working on a project last minute means that The Perfectionist is forced to relinquish some power and be willing to not be 'autistic' with the level of detail.
Your Perfectionist will not procrastinate, initially, but will procrastinate intermittently. They will procrastinate when they are contemplating a problem or chewing on a bone and the bone is chewing back. The upside is that the perfectionist will have a more detailed drawing/model but sacrifice holistic completion of a project. The Perfectionist will go back and forth on a single problem and battle to move on to the next part, thus pouring time down the drain. I don't know about all perfectionists but I take regular procrastination breaks. Long spells of concentrating are not my jive.
It is not uncommon to find that a perfectionist is an introvert. Introverts spend a lot of time contemplating the world's most complex problems, even the simple problems that mean nothing to anybody else. This is an inability to compartmentalize and that could be a result of a below average emotional intelligence. This translates seamlessly into their work.
2. The Creative
The Creative. I am envious of this kind of procrastinator. What the Creative loses in time, they make up for in efficiency. The Creative does not meander in detail or planning holistically. They solve a problem one part at a time and usually through some divine intervention of a random burst of creativity that solves the problem. Perhaps the most effective weapon in their arsenal is that they are not shy to track back and change a certain part of the process and carry on working. Instead, The Perfectionist wants to have it all figured out well before they attempt the problem. Now how do they procrastinate? Well this post is more to do with how 3 people, with 3 different types of operations, navigate their way through lost time. So in finishing, The Creative possesses a mechanism that bodes well when faced with lost time due to procrastination.
3. The 'Gooi-er'
The word gooi is an Afrikaans word for throw and can be used to also mean something resembling the Nike slogan...Just Do It. Or more accurately, Just Get It Done. All, that matters is completion. I have popularized the term amongst the Technology Students to describe two students I know to gooi like a fish swims. I also know for sure that they are tilting their head back and rolling their eyes because they know I am referring to them.
The Gooi-er will inevitably almost always let push come to shove. As a way to offset the problem of lost time, they will...gooi. That is to say that they will 'fix a steel beam to a steel column with bubblegum' or in other words do a half-cooked job of not bothering with finer detail (or anything resembling detail for that matter) so long as it 'looks right'. Look, points for being efficient and not wasting time on things that need not be dwelled upon.
I will be the first to say that even though this type of person avoids detail in a course that is built around detailing is a negative, the positive is that this displays characteristics of high emotional intelligence. Learn more about personality types here. People with the gooing gene are usually good at compartmentalization, as a result of their high emotional intelligence. This counts for little in marking the level of detailing, however.
The other Gooi-er that I have come to know also leans towards being a creative, a hybrid of the two. This means that they have increased efficiency and better work, owing to their creativity.
4. The Workaholic
"Wait...didn't you say 3 types in your title? Uhhh... yeah I did. Think of this one as a bonus because technically they don't count as procrastinators. These individuals are highly driven people and do border heavily onto being Perfectionists, so no one category is all cut and dried.
The Workaholic posses the most powerful tool of them all: self discipline. I have sat and marvelled at how long these oaks can sit still and churn out work. Hardly ever stopping to remove a fly on their eyebrow. They spend the most number of minutes being productive. They have schedules that they strictly abide by and as a result pigs fly out of their drawings...hell, unicorns too.
One other thing that I have observed is that they seem to be operating on a muscle memory system where they have become so efficient at performing non-problem solving functions that their bodies do without them putting much thought into it. A pedestrian example would be of a typist beating away at the keys. These students produce marvels, every time without fail and the marks reflect that.
You will get workaholics that are geniuses and totally socially bankrupt but some not geniuses nor socially bankrupt and vice versa. Okay okay, I'll put down my pompoms now...
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