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Top 10 Greatest Procrastinators
President Obama scolded Congressional Republicans for putting off a budget deal in his press conference on Wednesday. “Malia and Sasha generally finish their homework a day ahead of time. Malia’s 13, Sasha’s 10. It is impressive. They don’t wait until the night before, they’re not pulling all-nighters,” Obama said (technically Malia turns 13 on July 4). But many great minds put off their work until the last minute. From Bill Clinton to Leonardo da Vinci, click through to see history’s biggest procrastinators.
Rich Top 10
10. Franz Kafka:
Franz Kafka is a great example of a brilliant, accomplished man who procrastinated all his life. In 1908, Kafka landed a position at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, where he was fortunate to be on the coveted “single shift” system, which meant office hours from 8 or 9 in the morning until 2 or 3 in the afternoon. This was a distinct improvement over his previous job, which required long hours and frequent overtime. So how did Kafka use these newfound hours of freedom? First, lunch; then a four-hour-long nap; then 10 minutes of exercise; then a walk; then dinner with his family; and then, finally, at 10:30 or 11:30 at night, a few hours ofwriting—although much of this time was spent writing letters or diary entries.
9. Graham Greene:
Graham Greene needed a sign from above to begin working on a piece. Obsessed with numbers, the English playwright and novelist needed to see a certain combination of numbers by accident in order to write a single word. He would spend long periods of time by the side of the road looking at license plates and waiting for the hallowed number to appear. Maybe he was autistic.
8. Ralph Ellison:
“Whom the gods wish to destroy,” the critic Cyril Connolly said, “they first call promising.” In 1952, Ralph Ellison published his debut novel, Invisible Man, a modernist, integrationist masterpiece. He then worked on what was supposed to be his “symphonic” second novel until his death, in 1994. He never published a word of it, though he left behind more than 2,000 pages of manuscripts and notes, released posthumously, in 1999, as Juneteenth, a whittled down 400-pager, and in 2010 as the 1136-page-strong Three Days Before the Shooting.
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7. Douglas Adams:
Although he’s just now emerging as one of the greatest science fiction’s best novelists, Douglas Adams put off his writing so often that publishers had to force him into finishing his work by locking him in a room. And it’s not like he was waiting for inspiration to strike- Adams just straight-up didn’t like writing books.
6. Hunter S. Thompson
Thanks to waiting until the last minute to work on his article assignment and rambling the entire thing, Hunter S. Thompson accidentally invented a new journalism technique. While suffering a bout of health problems, Thompson committed suicide at the age of 67.
