Structured Procrastination

For all my fellow procrastinating multi-taskers: an approach that makes a virtue out of vice.

This section gets at the heart of the matter:

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

c/o Juan (October 20, 2004 02:04 PM comment at Crooked Timber).

Comments

[bitchphd]

OMG, I so wish I had written that.

[Rana]

Isn't it great? I particularly like this part:

"The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it."

This is the story of my life. :)

[LiL]

There is so much truth to this it's almost scary. Although I have to say, I've always just thought that what this article is describing is the list-making trick... Or, as my father would say, if you always do the easiest thing on your list, you'll then always have the next easiest thing to do, and so on until the one thing left becomes the easiest thing on your list because it's the only thing left to do.

Though normally I think one just adds harder things to the list, like the writer of the essay, and then the thing that was hardest before is no longer that hard to do. At which point you do it. So when I'm in my optimistic mood, I say this means that eventually everything gets done. And the trick is perhaps to learn to notice this or rather, to take notice when something that at some point in time appeared impossibly hard to finish has been finished - even if there are already some really hard new things at the top of one's master to-do list...