University of San Diego professor Frank Partnoy argues that the key to success is waiting for the last possible moment to make a decisionAn added bonus for me is it contradicts Malcolm Gladwell's Blink.
Whenever I have a pain or ache I wait (i.e, procrastinate) for days/weeks and invariably it goes away or at least gets better. Given that so-called cures like homeopathy, reiki, acupuncture, etc work no better than placebos, I guess this is not surprising.
But recently I had a case of procrastination that baffles me. I have a dishwasher that I never use. Several months ago water started to accumulate in it so that once a week I had to run it on the dry cycle to empty it out. Since it didn't seem to be causing an immediate problem I put off having it fixed. But lo and behold after several months it fixed itself and water stopped accumulating. Recently I had a handyman in for something else and I asked him to check my dishwasher because I feared the water might be going someplace else. He opened it up and it was completely dry, top to bottom. So procrastination even worked for my dishwasher!
Addendum 10/13/2012. On July 3, 2012 Frank Portnoy talked about his book Wait: The useful art of procrastination. at The RSA in England.