In the early 1980s, Douglas Adams was struggling to make progress on the fourth installment in his beloved series, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The great sci-fi humorist had learned from writing the previous books that good ideas usually came to him in the bath, so he would spend his mornings soaking in the tub until he had a eureka moment. Then he would get out to start writing, only to forget the idea while getting dressed, which meant he had no choice but to head right back to the tub.

After many months of failing to make progress, Mr. Adams scheduled a solo writing retreat for several weeks at a country manor. Unfortunately, he ended up befriending the hosts, and he spent most of the trip drinking wine. Just weeks before his manuscript was due, Mr. Adams had produced just 25 pages. “I love deadlines,” Mr. Adams has said. “I like the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”

If there was a world championship of procrastination, some of the top contenders every year would be writers. Margaret Atwood said years ago that her writing routine was to “spend the morning procrastinating and worrying, then plunge into the manuscript in a frenzy of anxiety around 3:00 when it looked as though I might not get anything done.” Yet when I interviewed Ms. Atwood recently on my TED podcast, WorkLife, she said that she had never missed a deadline.

Procrastination is delaying a task even though you expect that delay to come at a cost. Think of the last time you put off a project by watching cat videos on YouTube — and then ended up watching your cat watch cat videos. The question is what causes it and how to overcome it, and Ms. Atwood had an immediate answer: She procrastinates because she’s lazy. With all due respect, I beg to differ.