Ridiculous Procrastinator

"Bart, you had three months to do this project, and you started thirty seconds ago!"

— Edna Krabappel, The Simpsons, "Postcards from the Wedge"

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. They will put off writing a 10,000-word paper until the night before it is due, and once they sit down to start it, rhey will find half a million petty tasks that do not need to be done to avoid writing that paper. Often, they will find 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.

Most procrastinators are aware they have a problem and intend to correct their Fatal Flaw. They'll get right on it tomorrow.

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?

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Angeline/Angie from biotop fits the trope to a T. Despite being given the job by her superior to fulfil the wishes of 100 people across Japan, Angie spends most of the manga doing absolutely nothing, to the complete dismay of her aide Mouton/Muu.
• In a filler episode of Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Roy Mustang has 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.
• Kodocha: Sana's mother Misako treats deadlines as mere guideline and makes cruel fun of her editor.
• Chiaki of Laid-Back Camp often puts off studying for tests; Aoi recounts that this is something she's done all the time with her. That's why she has the worst grades of all the cast despite there being people more ditzy than her.
• 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.
• My Dress-Up Darling: Marin Kitagawa is this when it comes to schoolwork, and she admits she tends to leave it up to the last minute. Her father had to ground her because of that when he came to visit her during the summer break (while internally admitting that she probably inherited it from him).
• Pokémon: The Original Series: Ash Ketchum incessantly procrastinates on his training in the episodes leading up to the Indigo League and relies on dumb luck and his friends' advice to get through his early matches. Fortunately, losing before the quarterfinals leads to some much-needed Character Development, resulting in a more mature Ash who starts taking his Pokémon training more seriously.
• Chiaki Yoshino in Sekai-ichi 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.
• Shirobako has Director Kinoshita, whose Writer's Block and perfectionism cause him to delay everything to the last minute, from drawing storyboards, to deciding whether to do an explosion in CG or animate it traditionally, to deciding the plot of the Exodus finale. Internet legend has it that a legendarily bad episode of his previous project Jiggly Heaven was delivered five minutes before it was scheduled to air. When this is brought up in person, he vehemently denies it: it was in fact delivered ten minutes before airtime.

Audio Plays

• The Big Finish Doctor Who audio play "The Kingmaker" involves the Fifth Doctor being attacked by a time-travelling killer robot owned by a publishing company, there to force him to write a children's book he was contractually obligated to finish by threatening to kill him if he doesn't. The Doctor admits to having run off with his advance and done very little work but claims to enjoy writing, saying he was just struggling to get on with it. We only realise just how bad he's been at getting on with it when he goes to replay his voice notes from the last time he worked on it, and his voice sounds significantly deeper and more Tom Baker-y. Peri comments on this, but he tells her that "your voice always sounds different on tape".

Comic Books

• Archie Comics:
  • In Betty's Diary, 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.
  • Another comic had Archie continuously putting off writing a paper due the next day, on any topic of his choosing. After putting off the paper for pointless distractions like putting up pictures of Betty and Veronica, playing with his old train in the attic, going for snacks, etc., he wakes up the next morning and writes a paper about the ways teenagers put off doing their homework.
• Astro City: Mister Manta has been marooned on a deserted island for decades. He vows to return to civilization and resume his life of crime but keeps putting it off to improve his makeshift gear and weapons. In reality, he could leave if his gear was good enough to reach the mainland, but deep down he enjoys being The Hermit.

Comic Strips

• Calvin is always like this when it comes to his schoolwork—assuming that he bothers doing it at all, he'll always put off doing an assignment until the absolute last possible minute (he actually once completely forgot about an assignment until the day it was due, despite having at least a month to work on it). To name some specific examples:
  • When Calvin is assigned to give a report on the brain, he gets three days to prepare for it—he writes it on the bus on the way to school the day it's due. Unsurprisingly, his report is not nearly long enough to last all the way through the five-minute presentation.
  • In one story arc, Calvin is paired up with Susie for a project on Mercury. Despite Susie's constant reminders and being given a week to do it, he only starts working on it the very morning of the presentation at school. Susie is not pleased by Calvin's half of the presentation.
  • Another time, Calvin comes home chattering to Mom about how he has to make a desert life diorama in a shoebox for school. Mom, suspicious, asks when the assignment is due. Calvin tells her, "It was due today, but I told the teacher I wasn't quite finished."
  • Calvin once went on an epic flight of fancy. When his mother comes in to see if he's doing his homework, he cheerfully replies: "I've almost started!"
  • In one story, he's given two weeks to collect fifty different leaves for a school project, but he outright refuses to work on it until late into the evening before the day it's due. He then gets mad at his mom for not taking him to the arboretum twenty minutes before it closes, while she's busy preparing dinner, and when he gets the chance to pawn the project off to a pair of aliens, gets upset at them for arriving at the very last minute late at night.
  • Another story arc had Calvin wake up from a nightmare and realizing he forgot to do his math homework. He's saved by a snow day, but rather than do his homework, he goes out and plays the whole day, and only laments the wasted opportunity at bedtime. He's saved yet again the next day when the teacher forgets to collect the homework but goes out to play again instead of touching his homework.
  • In a different story arc, Calvin had to write an argumentative essay. He wastes the entire day on irrelevant tangents and flights of fancy, such as making an intelligence-enhancing device that didn't really make him any smarter than before and drawing useless doodles, and his bedtime arrives before he's even put a single word on paper. His mom gives him an extra thirty minutes to put something together, but he wastes even that complaining about how it's his mom's fault his essay's quality will suffer. The report is, unsurprisingly, awful, but his teacher shows him pity and raises his grade from a D- to a D. Unfortunately, this results in Calvin learning the lesson that "smooth-talking the teacher really pays off" rather than learning that he shouldn't procrastinate.
• Dilbert:
  • Wally 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.
  • The PHB has similar tendencies. He once tells Dilbert that an assignment is urgent, and Dilbert says it's only urgent because everything sits on the PHB's desk until it becomes either moot or a crisis. The PHB even stacks them in bins labeled "Aging", "Crisis", and "Moot". The PHB is so miffed by Dilbert figuring out his system that he vows to give him nothing but the "Moots". In fact, several of the engineers (Including Wally) have figured out how to determine if an assignment will ultimately end up as a "Moot", and thus can safely ignore it.
• 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.
  • In another strip, Andy confronts Peter about his not having turned in three lab reports. Peter defends himself by saying that he intends to wait until he learns how to time travel and use the technology to go back and do his homework then.
  • Jason, being a massive nerd, is an inversion. He loves schoolwork so much that 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.
  • For all that she complains about the constant procrastination of most of her family, whenever she's free and clear to work, Andy Fox will usually either just sit around and watch TV (usually talk shows and soap operas) or do whatever else she needs to do to avoid working on the column she's supposed to be writing. Pretty much the only time she does her work is when she's trying to avoid something even more unpleasant, such as playing chess with Roger.
• Peanuts: Quite common with Charlie Brown, Sally ("Some of my best reports have been written before breakfast!"), and Peppermint Patty.
• Sabrina at See-CAD: Sabrina struggles with this frequently in the strip, even yelling at the Interactive Narrator for trying to force her to start her homework.
• Zits:
  • Jeremy 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.
  • Pierce tops Jeremy, frantically finishing his paper while his teacher is taking it away.
    Pierce: Panic is my muse.

Fan Works

• Some Things Never Change: The ending of “Nothing Lasts Forever” reveals Patrick to be an extreme example of this. Unlike his workaholic (though equally immature) best friend, Patrick spent most of his life trying not to be in a rush and worry too much about growing up and finding work, so much so that he completely lost sight of the passage of time and wound up being a jobless Lazy Bum for two decades, until his friends accidentally give him an epiphany during their vacation cruise, which causes Patrick to immediately turn his life around become a responsible adult and an accountant.

Films — Animation

• In the Novelization of Turning Red, Mei puts off doing her math homework until the next morning. The next day, she puts it off again to be done on the ride to school which she forgets about. She remembers it when she gets into math class but decides it's no big deal compared to everything else she has going on and it's never mentioned whether she ever actually does it.

Film — Live-Action

• The Procrastinator, a 1952 Centron classroom educational film, is the story of chronic procrastinator Jean Nelson, who volunteers to plan a school dance. She's good at planning a party, but not so good at following up on what needs to be done: she almost fails to reserve the gymnasium in time, she doesn't assign the bringing of refreshments until the day before the party (forcing some of the kids' mothers to stay home from work in order to prepare the food), and she doesn't buy the crepe paper she needs until the day of the party, arriving late to boot and with not nearly enough crepe paper. The film ends with the dance ruined and Jean herself the recipient of a Reason You Suck Speech from one angry classmate.

Jokes

• 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!

Literature

• 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.
• In The House of Night series, Zoey and her friends pull this off to a ridiculous extent. They'll plan pretty early on what they want to do but will be so distracted by going to the movies or flirting with cute boys or whatever else that they won't actually do it until the book's almost over. In several cases, upon being presented with clear evidence that something's out of the ordinary, Zoey flat-out states that it's too freaky/stressful and she'll put it out of mind. This is especially bad in Chosen, where Zoey spends the entire book agonizing over how to heal the undead Stevie Rae, only for Aphrodite to come up with an answer in one sentence in the last few chapters: use a variant of a basic healing ritual that any vampire knows about. And it works.
• 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.
• 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. Same thing happens in the series.
• 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."
• Universal Monsters: Referenced in the epilogue of book 1, as Captain Bob looks on one of his websites for the most absurd headline possible for Current Events. One is "Scientist Discovers Secrets of Procrastination: Will Release Results At A Later Date".

Live-Action TV

• 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!
• 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^note who have no idea what to do, as they've never got past the door before, phones his mother^note before rapidly being reminded why he doesn't talk to her much, and then gets himself beaten up by a trio of Millwall fans^note who are just baffled by his antics, right up to the point where he insults their team to get an exemption. Being rescued by Manny, who knows how to complete a form, puts an end to that thread, but he continues to be a ridiculous procrastinator in basically all areas that do not relate to drinking.
• Sam Malone did this on Cheers once. Diane made them take a break for a week to figure out what the relationship was, and he spent the week partying with his friends, claiming that, even as a relief pitcher, he was known for 'coming through in the clutch', and that he worked better under a deadline. He was wrong.
• Fawlty Towers: Basil often procrastinates about mundane things that need to be done, leading to frequent nagging from Sybil.
  • This is a Running Gag in "A Touch of Class", in which Basil procrastinates hanging the picture, typing the menu, and serving drinks to Mr. Wareing because he would rather relax in the office, chat to the Major, and fawn over Lord Melbury. When he does try to do one of these tasks, he is interrupted by a guest, the telephone, or Sybil nagging him to do something else.
  • In "The Germans": Although Sybil is away in hospital, she frequently checks up on Basil by telephone, nagging him to hang the moose's head among other tasks.
    Sybil: It's been sitting there for two weeks, Basil.
• Growing Pains: A Season 4 episode, "Nasty Habits," sees Mike put off writing an important term paper until the night before it is due. Everything distracts him – even the then-brand-new song "Could've Been" by teen pop singer Tiffany. (The episode aired in December 1987, just as the song was starting to climb the charts.)
• 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.
• My World… and Welcome to It: In "The Shrike and the Chipmunks," John and author George Lockhart are assigned to produce a children's story with illustrations for an edition of The Manhattanite that is supposed to be released in two weeks. They spend almost the whole time together procrastinating while reading, swapping stories, and drinking copious amounts of bourbon and beer. It turns out that Lockhart is loathe to write yet another sugarcoated book for young readers, and when he finally manages to dash the story off, it's Darker and Edgier than his usual output.
• An episode of Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide dealt with Procrastination. Ned and Moze make a bet that Ned won't finish his social studies project on time because he'll procrastinate like he always does. This almost comes true until Ned learns that he can use his procrastination as a way to motivate himself, allowing him to complete his project and get a passing grade. Unfortunately, Moze loses the bet since she put off learning her dutch clog dance due to wanting to avoid wearing a pair of painful wooden shoes.
• 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!

Music

• "Hot Cocoa ~A Restless Night's Song~" is about Len having to pull an all-nighter to finish a major long-term assignment the night before it's due. Rin has to keep checking in on him throughout the song to make sure he stays on track and to keep him going with countless cups of hot cocoa.
  I had looked away from reality
  I've dug my own grave, day by day
  "Tomorrow, I can finish it." "I'll do it tomorrow!"
  Putting it off like that is how I reached this point today.

Radio

• Adventures in Odyssey:
  • "Isaac the Procrastinator": Isaac is a bright student, except for one thing - he always procrastinates. He now has three projects he's put off all needing his attention - a history paper, a geometry project, and an art assignment for the local newspaper - and his friends have just about had enough. Mr. Whittaker diagnoses Isaac with "chronic procrastinitis" and tells him there's only one cure: to buckle down and get to work.
  • "A Test for Robyn": Robyn puts off studying for a major history test - so much that she can't even answer simple questions about the material in class - and is forced to cram the night before. On the day of the test, she's confident at first but goes blank during the test and resorts to cheating. Afterward, she tearfully confesses and is allowed to retake the test because of her honesty, and resolves to study for tests way in advance from now on.
• Bleak Expectations: Despite being a purportedly brilliant novelist, Pip Bin runs into this trope in the fifth series, after getting into a "novel-off" with Charles Dickens (actually his arch-nemesis in disguise). Pip spends most of the allotted year drinking coffee, reading the encyclopaedia, drinking more coffee, staring forlornly out of hotel windows, having several dozen more coffees, and doing nothing in particular. Meanwhile, his best friend, sister, and wife all manage to write their own novels, with the latter two becoming instantly famous for what they've written (a cookery book and a sordid romance novel called Fifty Shades of Hay). Eventually, Pip just decides to steal his best friend's attempt.

Theater

• Steven Banks' Home Entertainment Center is a one-man show that was aired on Showtime and is centered on procrastination. Steven Banks is a businessman who loses the speech he wrote for his boss to deliver that night, so he needs to rush to re-write it, but instead he's repeatedly distracted and spends the entire show dicking around, baking cookies, playing dress-up, and singing songs. He never gets past "Ladies and gentlemen, board of directors..."
• The title character in Hamlet decides to kill Claudius early on, but spends much of the story fooling around and killing other characters. He finally does it near the end (and if Laertes hadn't imposed a half-hour deadline in the last scene, who knows whether he'd have done it then, either). Part of the reason for this is given as him waiting until he's absolutely certain that Claudius is guilty (reasonable enough, although that doesn't really explain why he needs to also fake insanity) and then refusing to kill Claudius at prayer after said guilt is established (as that would mean Claudius would go to heaven). On the other hand, it does take Hamlet a ridiculously long time to actually set up his plan to figure out if Claudius did, in fact, kill his father.

Video Games

• 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.
• 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 was basically just tying up loose ends and bugs to complete what is already an almost complete game.
• In I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, Nomi struggles with finishing their holonovel because they get burned out, and when they feel guilty by wasting their time not writing, they distract themself by chatting on their holopalm instead, making them more guilty of not working on their project.
• Procrastination Giants in Kingdom of Loathing. They decide to put off kicking your ass until tomorrow. While you are beating them into oblivion. One of their attack messages has them see a "Beat up intruders" on the calendar from two weeks ago and decide now's as good a time as any to do it. They can give you a status effect that makes you "decide to attack later" when you try to attack. And the giant trash falling from the sky? Well, guess whose turn it was for trash duty.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has Genli. While her younger sister Kheel is trying to get her and their three other sisters to go to music practice, Genli is insistent that she get to eat some salmon meuniere first, not because she's particularly hungry, but because she's using it as an excuse to skip music practice. She's even secretly glad that Divine Beast Vah Medoh was threatening Rito Village recently because she can use it as an excuse to not go to music practice.
• Valve Software 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. Probably justified in that Valve only has so many people working for them, as well as a "work on whatever game/project you want" policy. So, if nobody feels like working on your favorite game that week/month/whatever, you're probably not going to get updates for it for a while.
• The reason why the eponymous Violet threatens to leave the player character.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner:
  • Homestar does this by accident in the holiday cartoon "Homestar Presents: Presents". He not only sleeps in on the day he meant to go shopping for Decemberween presents, he then realizes it's Decemberween night. Much shouting of Oh, Crap! ensues, and Homestar ends up raiding the bargain bin at Bubs' Concession Stand.
  • Discussed in the Strong Bad Email "diorama". Strong Bad remarks that for a truly crappy diorama, "No sense in thinking about this one until you're on the bus on the way to school the morning it's due. Then it's time to whip out my old standby-orama: The Whimsical World of School Supplies!"

Webcomics

• Parodied in Bigger Than Cheeses with "Goonigoogoos Super Awesome Study Plan", which consists of points like "Waste your study break doing absolutely nothing, try to absorb as much info as possible 5 minutes before the test starts, completely luck out. Repeat."
• Bobwhite: Marlene.
• Daily JoJo: Eunjo's biggest flaw is that she tends to put off anything that takes effort or is unpleasant, foisting it onto her Tomorrow's Jo persona.
• Ben from Loserz. See this strip.
• PHD is made of this. Not only because the characters do it, but also because the author tours universities with a talk called "The Power of Procrastination".
• Unshelved had a procrastination storyline.

Web Original

• This blog post portrays ridiculous procrastination in text-adventure form.
• Hardly Working plays this for laughs for an entire sketch, where Grant and Raph procrastinate to a ridiculous degree. This includes Raph getting his hand out of a cement block, finding a new pair of pants, and killing his evil twin, and Grant getting his leg out of a bear trap, exorcising one of the Eight Kings of Hell, throwing a pagan idol into the sea, and, of course...
  Raph: Are you gonna continue living under the thumb of a child dictator whose divisive rethoric incites hate crimes while all the while ignoring the world's impending doom?
  Grant: No, I'm gonna vote. I mean, I'm not an idiot.
• SCP-____-J. It's a rock that makes you procrastinate.
• Titan Academy: One of the most defining trait of the main character JianHao, especially in the earlier skits. In case of study time, he'll do everything... except studying. However, due to Character Development, he's trying to not procrastinate as much as before in order to win the heart of his crush, the study-obsessed Denise.

Western Animation

• Arthur: "Arthur Plays the Blues" is mostly about the dangers of procrastination, as it nearly gets Arthur to lose his piano instructor and his hopeful future job.
• Bojack Horseman: In the first season, the titular character is given nearly two years to write his memoir, but never produces a word, which leads to him hiring a ghostwriter. Even in his last-ditch effort to write it all in a week, he distracts himself by cleaning, making coffee, taking a bath and playing with the fonts on his computer. Of course, it's just as much a result of his crippling self-consciousness as it is his inherent laziness.
• Family Guy: There's a meeting hall where one of the notices at a notice board was about a procrastinator's club meeting being postponed.
• Garfield and Friends: In the U.S. Acres segment, there's a procrastinators' club. They basically sit around saying "meh, we'll do it later" when it comes to actually doing anything club-like.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: Billy may be the reigning champ. In one episode, his class was supposed to write a book report. The next day, when the assignment is due, Billy is revealed to be the only one who didn't work on it. Grim decides to help him out by sending him into the future when he does finally finish it, so he can take it back and turn it in. We end up seeing that Billy is an old man by the time he's done. It ends up not mattering as the young Billy, instead of taking it back, deliberately destroys it because he thinks it's funny.
• House of Mouse: "Mickey's Piano Lesson" has Mickey putting off practicing for a piano recital with Minnie to do other things, like eating pie, giving Pluto a bath, going on a picnic, skating the half-pipe and skydiving.
• The Loud House: In "No Place Like Homeschool", Lincoln and eight of his sisters ask to be homeschooled because they are jealous that Lola gets to be homeschooled during her pageant season. However, they soon find out that they have tests they need to study for if they want to stay homeschooled. Despite multiple warnings not to goof off from Lola, that's exactly what they do instead of studying for their tests, resulting in Lola having to help them at the last minute.
• Recess: Inverted when the entire class has to stay inside due to a rainstorm. Gretchen gets so bored she decides to do tonight's homework right then and there... as well as all the homework for the next 7 years of her education.
• The Simpsons:
  • Lisa decides to write a novel and does absolutely anything she could to avoid actually writing.
    Lisa: WRITING IS THE HARDEST THING EVER!
  • Bart also has shades of this. From "Postcards from the Wedge":
    Mrs. Krabappel: Bart, you've had three months to complete this project, and you started thirty seconds ago.
  • "The Trouble with Trillions": Inverted when Ned Flanders begins preparing his taxes after midnight on New Year's Day. Played straight with everyone else in Springfield, who only started filing their taxes at the last minute before deadline, and the reason Homer's whole dilemma occurs is that he was the one who waited the most out of the whole city (rushingly bundling all of his badly-filled forms into a bundle shaped like a football (which made it roll into the audit bin at the IRS) and actually having to toss it into the outgoing mail pile through the closing office's doors).
• SpongeBob SquarePants doesn't normally have this trait, but he demonstrated it in an episode appropriately titled "Procrastination".
• Tiny Toon Adventures: Plucky Duck has done this a few times. Buster Bunny once made a whole episode doing a lecture about this, "Buster's Guide to Goofing Off".

Real Life

• If you are reading TV Tropes right now, odds are you're procrastinating. Truth in Television if there ever was such a thing. In fact, most Pot Holes to Ridiculous Procrastinator are not from example pages or character pages, but from Troper pages. (Bonus points if you are reading this page to procrastinate.) To try and get over it, put on a classic rock album and make your own Hard-Work Montage. U2, Jethro Tull, and Styx are good options. And then listen to it while browsing TVTropes.
• 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)"
• Yet another T-shirt reads "I Have Not Yet Begun To Procrastinate".
• An article by Terry Pratchett, describing how he went about writing a novel, said 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".
• Tim Urban, who did a TED talk on procrastination, has admitted to making almost the whole talk in 14 days (when he had 6 months).
• 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 that 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 stingray 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. During the radio series, the cast was sometimes being handed just-finished script pages immediately before (or during) recording.
• J. R. R. Tolkien was rather guilty of this. A number of potential academic collaborations ended up going nowhere. He once predicted in 1937 that he'd have the Hobbit sequel finished by spring next year. It would not be completed until 1949 with the appendixes still being edited in 1955 and a proposed index of names never finished. In Tolkien's case, it was less because he delayed and more because he got sidetracked by new ideas and avenues of exploration instead of focusing on the main point. The Silmarillion was never finished in his lifetime as he kept tinkering with the underlying philosophy and core concepts until his death.
• 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.
• Neil Gaiman tells a story about being at Harlan Ellison's house at the same time as an editor who had come to collect a new piece that Ellison had promised her for an anthology. Gaiman said that Ellison pulled him aside and told him to keep the editor distracted while Ellison finished writing the story.
  • Two of Ellison's most well-regarded stories, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, were each written the night before their deadlines.
• Pinball artist and designer Python Anghelo was known within Williams Electronics for waiting at least three days before the deadline to finish the artwork for a project.
• Akira Toriyama admits to and was hated by his editors for this when writing Dragon Ball procrastinating all of his work for the week by watching TV or making models until the last two days when he'd suddenly realized he had to draw and ink that week's issue and write the next storyboard. Oddly enough, other mangakas saw him as a prodigy for being able to do a week's worth of work in a day or two and with the end result being so damn good to boot. Especially since he didn't plan out any of the story in advance and made it up as he went.
• The cardinals electing The Pope used to be this. The record goes to the election of Gregorius X, which took 1006 days — that's almost three years. Partially justified by the fierce political divisions between pro-French and pro-Empire cardinals, and the first two compromise candidates refusing by means of running away from the city. They would have taken even more time had the people of Viterbo not decided that enough was enough and locked the cardinals in the Palace of the Popes, denied them food other than bread and water, and finally removed the roof until they came to a concensus. And that's to say nothing of the political pressure and threats the crowned heads of Europe used to "convince" the cardinals to hurry up and decide already. That election will always hold the record because Gregorius X put into law the means the people of Viterbo used to hurry up the cardinals (besides the removing the roof bit — which was too expensive — and the political pressure — which he couldn't control but could rely on anyway). Gregorius X replaced the aforesaid punishments with one where the cardinals wouldn't get paid until they decided on a new Pope, which was just about as effective.
• The horror author T.E.D. Klein has admitted to absolutely hating writing to the point he decided he preferred working a 9-5 job. He started his second novel, Nighttown, in the eighties, and hopes to finish it now that he's reached retirement age.
• Mark Twain: "Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after tomorrow."
• ADHD comes with executive dysfunction which can cause people with the condition to put off tasks, even tasks they enjoy and have no reason not to actively just do, and oftentimes simply forget to do it. However, it's not always quite the same as active procrastination, as the issue isn't that the sufferer actively puts off the task (though they may or may not also do that) but rather that they simply can't get themselves started on the task no matter how much they try. Still, to an outsider, it can look like this.
• Autistic inertia is a widely reported but scarcely researched^note the first scientific study on it was conducted in 2021 phenomenon among autistic individuals in which they find it difficult to start, stop, or switch tasks, even if it involves switching to one that they actively enjoy. Like executive dysfunction in ADHD, the phenomenon is not synonymous with active procrastination but is rather the result of a brain-body disconnect present across multiple aspects of autism. However, it can look like this to an outsider, especially since the lack of formal documentation means that most allistic people (and even some autistic people) aren't even aware that it exists.
• Excessive procrastination may be a symptom of depression for some sufferers, as depression is notorious for causing sufferers to lose interest in things they once enjoyed or were active in. Unfortunately, it's one of the most commonly overlooked symptoms because, to someone unfamiliar with depression, it comes off as pure laziness. It's not so much they're trying to procrastinate as it is they simply don't have the energy.
• Gioachino Rossini was infamous for procrastinating to a ridiculous degree; he claimed to have composed The Barber Of Seville in less than two weeks, and wrote the famous overture for Wilhelm Tell on the day of the premiere.
• Peter Gabriel is one by his own admission. Similar to Douglas Adams above, So producer Daniel Lanois resorted to locking Gabriel in the studio to get him to finish the album.
• Joe Raposo, staff composer for Sesame Street, was known to write some of his songs in the taxi on the way to the recording session.
• Jennifer Saunders wrote her scripts for Absolutely Fabulous within a few hours of rehearsal time, often dictating dialogue to her daughter as they drove to school.

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