The beauty of waiting until the last minute to do something is that it'll only take a minute.

Such is the procrastinator's motto, and it's mostly tongue-in-cheek. But research conducted by organizational psychologist Adam Grant suggests there is a real benefit to meeting deadlines at the eleventh hour.

Procrastinating makes you more creative, Grant says.

In addition to being a professor in UPenn's Wharton Business School, Grant is the author of "Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World." The book explores creativity from behind the scenes, as Grant tries to learn what makes the most innovative people tick and offer tips for becoming more like them.

Many of those people, he found, procrastinated to some degree before coming up with their most original ideas.

So long as you're delaying your work with the explicit idea of coming back to it, Grant says in a recent TED talk, "procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps."

When Dr. Martin Luther King was preparing his famous speech on Washington in 1963, the final edits came just minutes before the speech was to be delivered. His most memorable line, "I have a dream," wasn't in the original script, Grant says, yet it was the one history remembers most vividly.

Procrastinating doesn't work in all cases. If you really wait until the last minute to do something, you'll probably find yourself scrambling to cobble something together haphazardly. The work won't be creative; it'll be desperate.

It's also possible to procrastinate for too long, Grant says. In a study he and his colleagues conducted in which people were asked to play Minesweeper in between a brainstorming session for new business ideas, only those who procrastinated "moderately" showed big leaps in creativity.

The people who procrastinated for 10 minutes instead of five were just as creative as people in the control group, who didn't procrastinate at all.

Somewhere in there is a sweet spot, Grant says. So-called "originals" — people who exemplify that innovative, creative spirit — give themselves enough lead time to get the work done, but wait long enough to let the ideas incubate before rushing to finish the work.

The most creative people are procrastinators, in other words, because they know the most original ideas aren't the first ones they come up with.

To arrive at something truly unique, you always need the slow and sometimes frustrating ingredient of time.

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