| This past week, The New Yorker’s Jessica Winter reported on a growing trend on college campuses: professors who have become more lenient about deadlines. The accommodating approach is new, but one of the problems it addresses—procrastination—is timeless. Ogden Nash bemoaned its ill effects in a 1939 poem in the magazine; looking slightly further back, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs urged against it. In 2010, James Surowiecki examined procrastination, noting its rise as “a significant field in academia,” and marvelling at the hundreds of millions of dollars that Americans lose annually by failing to file their taxes on time. The paradox of procrastination—its obvious costs and seeming irresistibility—has vexed scholars for centuries, with everyone from philosophers to game theorists weighing in on why we persist in such predictably self-harming behavior. Surowiecki also surveys possible solutions, finding inspiration in figures such as the mythical Ulysses, the Civil War general George McClellan (“one of the greatest procrastinators of all time”), and the novelist Victor Hugo, who stayed on task with a creative technique involving nudity. We intend to give the Hugo method a try—just after we take a quick peek at our phone. | 
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