Many years ago, in the days of dedicated word processing machines (1970s and 1980s), I was employed by a major environmental consulting firm as a word processor and then a word processing manager (of a 10-person word processing center using Xerox 850s and 860s). I was specifically tasked with responsibility for proposal production, including the upkeep of standard proposal components (resumes, project descriptions, awards, and other boilerplate).
During all the years I worked for that firm, our environmental and engineering staff members were constantly pushed to maximize their billable hours ("real" work). So there was a strong tendency to leave any overhead or administrative work for last, after all the billable work was finished.
Non-technical folks involved in the proposal effort were particularly frustrated by this drive. Many of our environmental projects were huge, multi-year studies with annual or quarterly reports, but proposals had a maximum of 30 days between issuance of the RFP and delivery of the proposal. So it was a constant effort to have technical staff put aside a billable project to complete their proposal assignments, regardless of whether that assignment involved 15 minutes to update a project description or resume, or many hours to create a project approach or Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) process for the project.
One of our senior terrestrial biologists was a particular challenge to marketing staff. Jim was a dedicated and gifted scientist, as well as a pretty good writer. So he was as much value to field efforts as he was to subsequent reporting efforts. When he finally got around to it, he could turn in many more pages of information than we had asked for or needed, all of it interesting and well written. And his proposal text could generally be counted on to need very little editing, except when the RFP stipulated very strict page limits.
The problem was that Jim was absolutely convinced that he wrote better under extreme pressure. So he would put off proposal-writing chores until the very last minute. In fact, he rarely started writing before the due date for sections from all technical folks working on the proposal. It never seemed to matter to him that his procrastination caused great problems for others who couldn't start their own proposal assignments until his draft was typed, printed, and shared.
The last three or four days of proposal production became a nightmare when Jim was on the proposal team. Everyone started getting anxious long before the due date, just anticipating how his habitual procrastination would make their jobs harder than necessary. His division manager had numerous "talks" with him, but because he was considered so valuable to the firm's projects, there were no consequences when he created such a nightmarish final three days for everyone else on the proposal team.
The firm's ultimate solution was to take another senior biologist and impress him with the fact that proposal deadlines were just as serious as project deadlines, teach him how to manage his time to respond to proposal needs while keeping his projects moving along, and improve our proposals and our hit rate by reducing the anxiety levels associated with pursuit of new work.