“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” Those are the words of the late (in both senses), great Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I love deadlines, too. I’d be lost without them. For 11 years every week, I have faced this big black hole of a column, and somehow filled it with detritus from my brain. Today is a particularly bad day for deadlines. I can see the deadline looming out of one eye only, because the other one is a swollen pink blob due to an allergic reaction. I’m stoned on Piriton.

So now’s the time to write about the art of procrastination. I could have met this deadline nice and early – if I were someone else. But I am by nature an “arousal procrastinator”, one who, according to the online magazine Slate, “seeks the excitement and pumping stress hormones of having to finish everything under duress”. That would be why I didn’t hand my novel in until I saw it advertised in the publisher’s catalogue – a year late. That’s why I took the last possible coach to Luton for the plane this week, got stuck in M1 traffic, and completed a record-breaking sprint in heels to the departure gate. One minute early. So then I ran off to buy the paper to fill the extra time.

There is another species of lateness addict – the “avoidance procrastinators”, who “make their work the measure of their self-worth and so end up putting it off out of fear”. You know these people: proud possessors of great unfinished novels, or great unfinished loft conversions. Before I had children, I was an avoidance procrastinator, too, working and reworking prose in an attempt at perfection. Then I had too many kids and too little time, so I concluded: “Guess what? I’m not James Joyce, so I’d better just shut up, type something fast and stop using the word artiste, with an ‘e’.”

Procrastinating is becoming popular. A quarter of people describe themselves as “chronic procrastinators”, and hate smug, well-organised perfectionists with a vengeance. Gordon Ramsay recently described himself as a “perfection addict”, and to go by the billboards featuring his ubiquitous face, he needs to indulge in more procrastination and slow cooking. Procrastinating is secretly a way of giving yourself permission to do a less than perfect job. Being about to fail to finish something puts ideas of perfection out of your head. The last-minute scrabble will be messy, but usually adequate.

John Perry, an academic at Stanford University, who has become a professor of procrastination in his spare time, runs a website called Structured Procrastination, and even provides T-shirts for the disorganised needy with the slogan: “I’m not wasting time – I’m a structured procrastinator.” He is a great supporter of all half-written, half-read, half-done, half-baked projects. There is nothing wrong, we procrastinators feel, in advancing sporadically on many fronts, and only completing things in dire emergencies.

Most procrastinators are not lazy people per se; wasting time keeps us very busy. While I may not have finished two features, another column, a synopsis of a novel, my expenses and a review of a school play from two months ago, I have been working very hard on my allotment, which has the natural deadlines of the passing seasons. Thus, my purple dwarf beans are in, the cane frames for the runner beans are up, and my monthly salad sowing is flourishing. On the living-room windowsill are carefully tended tomato, courgette, pumpkin and sweetcorn seedlings. Is there any food in the fridge for the children? No. Priorities, priorities. Let them eat cereal and takeaways.

My structured procrastination takes the form of lists. I have a black diary and write a list in it. Often this is a copy, in my best handwriting, of the same list I made last week. Then I have the “today” list inked on my hand. This is the do-it-or-die list, which prevents, say, articles going unwritten, or children being left without lifts from sports fields. With three children and a dog, it’s inevitable you’ll lose one for short periods of time, but this makes them all very resilient.

I had thought this system, lurching between the black book and the hand, was irresponsible, but according to Prof Perry, I’m just using “task quality triage”, prioritising things that are fun or necessary. Why pay parking tickets when there will be an amnesty soon, and why settle bills in this economic climate? Plus, I have no intention of ever delving into the growing pile of mystery objects on the kitchen table. Later is, in every way, better.

kate.muir@thetimes.co.uk

Kate Muir’s novel, West Coast, is out now (Headline, £16.99)

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