"I work best under pressure"

This belief holds the whole habit up. It deserves a fair hearing, because it's built on something that has happened to you many times.

The last night is different. You sit down at eight and the swerve doesn't come. The doubts that stopped you for three weeks have gone quiet. You make decisions quickly, you don't reread every sentence, and pages appear. Around midnight you may even enjoy it. Compared with the grey, distracted half-hours you managed earlier in the month, it feels as if a different person is doing the work. It's natural to conclude that you need the pressure, and that starting early would only mean more grey half-hours.

So what does the last night supply? I count four things.

It removes the choice. For three weeks, every possible session began with a question, whether to do this now or later, and later kept winning. On the last night there is no later. You spend nothing on deciding, so everything goes on the work.

It quiets the judge. There's no time to wonder whether the opening is good enough, so you stop wondering. You have permission to write an adequate sentence and move on, and the clock is what gave it to you.

It shrinks the job. With one night left you can't do the ideal version, so you do a version that fits the night. You cut the section that needed more research. On a calm afternoon you'd never have let yourself cut it.

And it settles the argument. Not doing the work has at last become more frightening than doing it.

Read that list again, because none of the four is pressure. They're a removed choice, a quiet judge, a smaller job and a settled argument. Pressure was only how they got delivered, and it's an expensive way to get them. Each can be had on a quiet Tuesday. A fixed time removes the choice. Permission to be bad quiets the judge. A time limit shrinks the job. Most of the second half of this book is about arranging those on purpose.

You can get to the airport in forty minutes if you're about to miss the flight. That proves you can drive fast when frightened. It doesn't show that's how you drive best, or that you'd have arrived any later by leaving on time.

There's a problem with the word "best", too. If every important piece of work for ten years was done in the final stretch, you have a long record of what you produce under pressure. You have almost no record of what you'd produce with a rough version on day two and ten days to improve it. The comparison has never been run. The grey half-hours don't count as a test, by the way. In those you were trying to write the good version cold, with the judge wide awake and the option to stop. That's the hardest way to work that I know of, and it's no surprise it went badly.

Where the comparison has been measured, the last night doesn't come out ahead. The students in Tice and Baumeister's study who put things off got lower marks on every assignment. In 2007 Piers Steel pulled together 691 correlations from the procrastination research. One of his findings bears on the idea that last-minute workers are people who need a thrill to function. If that were so, you'd expect procrastination to go with sensation seeking, and Steel found only a weak connection. Sirois and Pychyl, discussing later studies that went looking for the thrill-seeking procrastinator, called the idea unfounded. They suggested it's more often a story told afterwards to save face. That's blunter than I'd be. I think it's an honest mistake, made by people who have only ever seen one side of the comparison.

There is research on the other side, and you should have it. In 2005 two researchers, Chu and Choi, surveyed students and described a group they called active procrastinators. These people choose to leave things late, like the pressure, hit their deadlines, and do about as well as people who don't procrastinate at all. They have similar confidence and a similar sense of control over their time. It's a single questionnaire study of students, but I don't doubt such people exist.

Their description makes a useful test. Did you decide to do this piece of work late, with a date in mind, and then spend the waiting time untroubled? Were you satisfied with what you sent? If so, this chapter isn't about that piece of work, and you can leave a working arrangement alone. If the waiting time was full of dread and the honest word for the result is "fine", then you didn't choose the pressure. You ran out of alternatives.

The fear underneath this belief is that without the deadline you'd have no engine at all. I understand it, and I'd only ask you to hold the question open until chapter 8. What I'm going to suggest keeps the things the last night gives you. It moves them to the front.