Andrew Santella

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Dey Street Books is proud to announce the publication of SOON: An Overdue History of Procrastination, from Leonardo and Darwin to You and Me by Andrew Santella (On Sale: March 13, 2018), a thought-provoking exploration of procrastination and some of history's most notable procrastinators.
Santella, a Brooklyn-based writer for numerous publications such as GQ, the New York Times Book Review, Slate, and TheAtlantic.com, is a self-proclaimed procrastinator. Concerned about his habit, but not quite ready to give it up, he set out to learn all he could about the human tendency to delay. When 20 percent of us are procrastinators, a third of all American undergraduates call themselves severe procrastinators, and a staggering 100 minutes of every workday are squandered away by employees, could procrastination really only stem from laziness when so many of our greatest inventors, artists, and scientists are considered members of the same club?
Santella studied history's greatest procrastinators-from Leonardo da Vinci and Frank Lloyd Wright to Charles Darwin and prophets from the Old Testament-to gain insights into human behavior, and perhaps kill time, "research being the best way to avoid real work." He spoke with psychologists, philosophers, and priests. He visited New Orleans' French Quarter, home to a shrine to the patron saint of procrastinators. And at the home of Charles Darwin outside London, he learned how and why the scientist wrote volumes on coral reefs and obsessively studied barnacles during the twenty years between developing his theory of natural selection and actually publishing The Origin of Species. Yet Darwin is remembered not for procrastination, but his brilliance and diligence; it is his delay itself that makes him so human.
With his new book, Santella isn't looking to putting an end to procrastination or to even excuse it. Instead, he refreshingly suggests that delay and deferral can help us understand what truly matters to us. "Sometimes the best things you do are the things you do only to put off doing something else." This is a book for everyone who has ever put off something important.