PROCRASTINATION IS THE THIEF OF TIME1: SURVIVING GUIDELINES

The title of this editorial is the first line of a Shakespearean-style sonnet, penned (the author more accurately stated, “penciled”) by a young schoolboy as a punishment for being late. The author later became a professor of poetry at both Cornell and Oxford Uni-versities, and his message from more than half a cen-tury ago has a powerful bearing on the problems we face in healthcare today. Time has an inverse quality—the less time some-thing takes, the greater we value the process. Time has an easily quantifiable value when measured in railway timetables and the speed of processing units in computers. In the management of critically ill patients, the more quickly treatment is started, the more likely the outcome will be satisfactory. The element of tim