A Way for a Scientist to Procrastinate: A Study on Scientific Procrastination

Is there a better for a scientist to procrastinate than to study how scientists procrastinate? Yes, there is. Writing a paper about it, and publishing it in Nature Physics.

Conference registration: how people react to a deadline
Nature Physics 3, 746 (2007)
Valentina Alfi, Giorgio Parisi1, Luciano Pietronero

The influx of registrations showed, from the outset, clear linear behaviour. The problem was, however, that the extrapolation of this linear behaviour to the deadline gave a very low number of expected participants. Clearly people tend to register late and one should expect a steepening of the distribution as the deadline approaches — but by how much? Is it possible to predict accurately the final number of registrants?

In this graph we can clearly see how scientists leave everything for the last minute. This might be generalized to a group consisting of non-scientists, and maybe even to most peopl.