Ridiculous Procrastinator

Calvin: You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
Hobbes: What mood is that?

Calvin: Last-minute panic.
—Calvin and Hobbes

Procrastination is the putting off of an unpleasant task until the last minute. It's quite common. Hell, if you are reading this, you probably are procrastinating right now. The Ridiculous Procrastinator is someone—often someone very capable—who does this to such ridiculous extremes that it is almost funny. He will put off writing a 10,000-word paper until the night before it is due, and once he sits down to start it, he will find half a million petty tasks that do not need to be done to avoid writing that paper. Often, he will realize that he could have avoided all of this, as he finds that the assignment practically writes itself once he gets going.

Some common tactics of the Ridiculous Procrastinator include sharpening pencils, constantly checking email, cleaning, feeding the pets, talking on the phone (bonus points if they talk about the task), reading TV Tropes (bonus bonus points if they're reading this page) and basically anything that they can do to avoid doing what they have to do.

When they finally begin working (usually when they realize they only have about an hour left to finish), they begin working like The Flash after drinking 12 pots of coffee. In some cases, they finish their project at the last minute, run like madmen to their class (or workplace, or what have you), only to find out that the deadline's been changed, or the project's been canceled, meaning they've done all that work for nothing.

There are a ton more examples beyond those listed below, including:

... bah, we'll add them later we got time, you wanna shoot some hoops or get something to eat?

Examples of Ridiculous Procrastinator include:

Anime and Manga

  • Lucky Star: Konata and Tsukasa dedicate entire episodes to this. Konata is a better example of this though—her last-minute studying can be so effective that it puts her in the Brilliant but Lazy category.
  • In a filler episode of the 2003 anime version of Fullmetal Alchemist, Roy Mustang had done several things such as sleep at his desk and try to feed his subordinate's dog, Hayate, before finally getting to work on reports at the last minute.
  • Chiaki Yoshino in Sekaiichi Hatsukoi is a mangaka infamous among the editors for his last-minute work. In general, the editors in this series spend their lives running after their procrastinating charges to get manuscripts on time.

Comic Books

  • In Betty's Diary of Archie Comics, Betty once wrote about trying to fix everything that she's been trying to put off. Sounds well and good, and she even inspired Archie to do the same. Except, Archie is a much worse procrastinator than she was. He wound up spending almost an entire week trying to do the things that he's been putting off.

Literature

  • During a flashback in the first Red Dwarf novel, Rimmer spent so long creating an extremely intricate and detailed study plan that he didn't actually have any time to study.
  • In The Cheese Monkeys the last chapter had this where Happy and his classmates verge on insanity only to find that their professor has been fired and they've been awake for five days for no reason.
  • In several stories of Ephraim Kishon: Several artisans - one plumber, one painter and the most Egregious example would be a carpenter who once promised to make him a table in a few weeks, and delivered after years.
  • While we're at it: There's a story about a rabbi who orders a pair of trousers from a tailor while on a trip, but has to leave the town again before the tailor's finished them. Six years later, he coincidentally travels to the town again, where he runs into the tailor, who happily tells him that he just finished the trousers.

Rabbi: "God created the whole world in six days, but you need six years for a pair of trousers?"
Tailor: "Yes, rabbi - but look at the world, and then look at these trousers!"

  • Oblomov. After the head of his village tells him that there are problems, he starts thinking about reforms, and spends the next years with that, without doing anything.
  • Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat" (1889): "It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours."

Live Action TV

  • The Malcolm in the Middle episode "Reese Cooks" featured a subplot where Francis kept on procrastinating on his paper, finding the most ridiculous things to do to avoid working on it until his friend locks him in a room alone with just his pencil and paper. Francis then spots a loose thread, and when his friend opens the door in the morning, he finds Francis sitting there with his sweater completely unraveled.
  • The first episode of Black Books features Bernard doing this to avoid doing his taxes. He lets in a pair of door to door evangelists, phones his mother, and then tries to get himself seriously injured to get an exemption.
  • Neil on The Young Ones managed to do this in miniature: attending an exam, he squandered so much time laying out his writing implements, good-luck charms, and other materials that he never actually got the chance to write anything!
  • One episode of The Amanda Show featured a sketch about a superhero called The Procrastinator.

Man: Procrastinator, Procrastinator! My baby is stuck in a tree!
Procrastinator: A Tree! That’s no place for a baby, The Procrastinator to the rescue!
(man starts to leave, Procrastinator doesn't follow)
Man: Hello, Procrastinator, my baby?!
Procrastinator: Yes he is in a tree, I’ll save him... eventually!

Newspaper Comics

  • Jeremy from Zits is a master of this. In one instance, he stays up all night working on a playlist to listen to while writing a huge paper that's due the next day; he plans to start actually writing at dawn.
  • FoxTrot: Peter Fox once started reading Moby Dick the morning of the due date of his essay on it. His father is genuinely proud of this, saying that it reminds him of when he did his entire dissertation the morning of the day it was due.
    • Jason, being a massive nerd, is an inversion. He loves schoolwork so much he once finished his exams early - in September. Another time, he waited until the last minute, literally, to begin an exam, saying he liked the challenge.
  • Peanuts: Quite common with Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty.
  • Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin is a repeat offender.
  • Wally from Dilbert. He is a master of this trope, minus the part about doing anything. In one comic, he convinces the Pointy-Haired Boss to not give him any projects for the next year as he's working on the WDNW project, which he says "prevents the 1s and 0s in the code from becoming 10s". He buys it, and Wally points out that the PHB never realized that the full name of the project was the Wally Does No Work Project.

Video Games

  • Valve Corporation is infamous for this to the degree that they bragged about releasing on time in "Still Alive", and proudly declared that Portal 2 had the shortest delay they'd ever managed.
  • The release date for anything new for either City of Heroes and City of Villains? "Soon."
    • A minor meme on some forums (particularly Blizzard and Valve) is pretending that the word "soon" is copyrighted, because they use it so dang much.
  • Procrastination Giants in Kingdom of Loathing. They decide to put off kicking your ass until tomorrow. While you are beating them into oblivion. Sometimes, at the very end of the battle, they give you a status effect that makes you "decide to attack later" when you try to attack.
  • Possibly also this trope (among other reasons) for the famous non-vapor Vaporware Duke Nukem Forever, as when Gearbox Software took over the game was completed and released suspiciously fast. It was said during an interview all Gearbox did is basically just tying up loose ends and bugs to complete what is already an almost complete game.

Web Original

  • This blog post portrays ridiculous procrastination in text-adventure form.

Web Comics

Western Animation

Real Life

  • If you are reading TV Tropes right now, odds are you're procrastinating.
  • A popular line of T-shirts carried the slogans "I'll Procrastinate Tomorrow" and "Procrastinators Unite Tomorrow".
  • Another T-shirt reads "Top Ten Reasons I Procrastinate: 1) " 'Cause it never finishes the list.
  • An article by Terry Pratchett, describing how he goes about writing a novel, says that in the old days all writers could do that counted as "work" but wasn't actually writing was change the typewriter ribbons and clean the "e" with a pin. In the computer age, however, you can spend hours writing macros that would speed up your writing by a couple of minutes. And if you get bored with that, you can read anything that looks interesting, which is called "research".
  • Douglas Adams: "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by". The reason the first Hitchhiker's book ends where it does is because at that point his editor lost patience with all the missed deadlines and told him to just finish the page he was on. According to The Salmon of Doubt, he once took an impromptu trip to Australia to comparatively test-drive a new underwater vehicle and a sting ray for an article so that he could procrastinate on another one. Similarly, he once hiked up Mt. Kilimanjaro—spending a part of a trip in a rhino suit—for similar purposes (though that was also for charity.) During the writing of Mostly Harmless he was locked in his hotel room by his editor and was only allowed out for the occasional walk.
  • Frank Frazetta did almost all of his work within a day of their deadlines. While the finished product was always top-notch, it would take him several days to recover from exhaustion.
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