They say that if you want to get something done, you should ask a busy person. A new paper that’s analysed data from a popular productivity app appears to back up this folk wisdom in a specific way – busier people are better at dealing with missed deadlines.

Keith Wilcox at Columbia University and his colleagues analysed task deadline and completion data from over 28,000 users of the productivity app (they don’t state the name of the app, but it sounds a bit like i done this). In total, the data set included 586,808 tasks – everything from doctor’s appointments to project reports – spanning a period of 538 days.

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Missing deadlines is an incredibly common experience, and it often has a bad effect on people’s productivity, hitting morale and provoking procrastination. The researchers’ basic point is that being busy, or probably just feeling busy, can inoculate us against this demoralising effect. When you’re busy and you miss a deadline, it’s easy to think to yourself that you you may have lost the battle, but you’re still winning the productivity war. For this reason, the researchers suggest that it may even be beneficial to engender in yourself or your staff, a feeling of busyness – not too much obviously, you don’t want to feel overloaded, but just enough.

“In a workplace setting, purposively keeping people busy may be a simple and effective antidote to chronic procrastination and task-completion tardiness,” the researchers said. “For example, managers may find that their subordinates are more likely to be productive if they give them more, not less, to do.”

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