I have trained myself over the years to be prepared as early as possible when I have to deliver something. I guess it comes from my high school days when I was finishing all my planned studies and homework as soon as possible to get myself out of the classroom and into the dark room (in this digital era, do I have to explain what a dark room is)?

As a professional, I argued in the past that waiting until the last minute to deliver something was a way of procrastinating and putting off what you know you ultimately have to do. But like most of you, I realized that too often I found myself the night before a presentation working on it for the first time. I used to get angry at myself, justifying the situation by saying it was the workload that caused me to delay.

When I refer to “waiting until the last minute,” I am not talking about a public presentation like a seminar or a keynote, which requires additional homework due to the nature of the presentation and the “show” aspect of it. I am referring to the many updates, summaries, reports and planning that you have to do internally for your team, employees or the board. These presentations are important as they provide stakeholders motivation and a feeling of constant involvement in decisions and company direction. However, they have to be delivered consistently (monthly, quarterly) or momentum can be lost.

I have come to realize that not only was I getting used to delaying but also that my presentation “felt” better when I did it a few days or the night before the meeting. I took the time to understand how I was doing it and found out that even when I had time to work on it in advance, I was still waiting for that “night before.” So, why has this become a standard way of operating for me? Simple - clarity.

Things become instantly clear when I am forced to create something - I get to the essence of the subject because I have to. Here’s how it works for me…

• A few days before I know I have to put together a presentation, I begin to imagine the moment of my presentation and come up with the 3 or 4 most important things that people I am presenting to need to know.
• I try to envision the participants’ reactions to all the statements that I want to make.
• I make a mental list of what I want them to leave with after the presentation. Or what I want them to do with the information.
• Most of all, I call, meet or email some of the participants with specific points that I want to validate or that I know they may not agree with. I try to summarize, verbally in my mind, the presentation itself.

And then at that magic moment, usually the evening before the day of the presentation, I sit down and write the deck. It flows, it covers all the key points because I ran through it in my head many times before I sat down to write.

I always allow myself to sleep on it, get up early the next morning and review it to make a few minor adjustments and at the moment I get up to present the deck, I know it’s exactly the message I wanted to get across.

I think the right phrase to explain this phenomenon would be “planned procrastination.”