There have been numerous attempts to identify what makes a procrastinator. Regularly delaying tasks you know you should start working on immediately doesn’t just prevent you achieving your goals and full potential it can also be expensive, bad for your health, and may even endanger your life and those of the people around you.

“But procrastinators have these big black holes.” For some 15 to 20 per cent of us, the problem is serious. “Everyone has times when at the end of the day they don’t know what they have done with it,” says psychologist Robert Topman at Leiden University in the Netherlands. We all struggle occasionally with the desire to postpone an unpleasant job, be it drawing up a will, studying for an exam or clearing the clutter from the basement. “I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” Adams, whose works include The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was a poster boy for procrastinators everywhere. When he died in 2001, he had spent a decade on the book without even a complete first draft to show for it. The eccentric British writer soaked for hours in the bathtub, lollygagged away entire days in bed and dreamed up ever more fanciful excuses for his exasperated editor. DOUGLAS ADAMS did everything humanly possible to avoid the daily drudgery of plonking down at his desk and pounding out his novel The Salmon of Doubt.

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