Procrastination is Okay — If You’re Smart About It

Interview

Procrastination: it’s a favorite pastime and a driving force for many of us. If you’re reading this, there’s a chance you’re having a nice procrastination session right now.

What are people’s favorite ways to procrastinate? Well, YouTube views seem to show that cat videos are right up there, so if all you’re looking to do is waste some time and distract yourself from deadlines, be my guest:

 

 If, however, you’ve come here in the hopes of learning some useful tips about making procrastination work for you, then read on!

 

Procrastinators Can Still Get Work Done

(Tweet this thought.)

As a former philosophy student, I spent most of my time procrastinating by reading anything but philosophy. Luckily, this means I came across a variety of ways of making procrastination efficient and effective.

As a procrastinator, you put off things that you should be doing, but the key is that procrastinators still do something. You just do slightly useful things. When you’ve got assignments and essays to be doing, you tidy your room or start going to the gym.

So what is the solution? As long as there are more difficult tasks out there you want to avoid, a you can be made to do time-consuming and important tasks by thinking of them as a way of not doing something more important.

 

Structured Procrastination

In an essay by John Perry — which he wrote when he had more important things he should have been doing, and read by myself when I had more important things to be doing — Perry describes how you need to create a hierarchy of the tasks you have to do, from the most important and urgent to the least. It’s the most important tasks on top that procrastinators avoid. What a structured procrastinator does so well is dedicating the time spent avoiding the most important tasks to completing the other worthwhile tasks lower on the list.

Doing the apparently lesser tasks becomes an effective way of avoiding the dreaded main project, while actually making you a successful and effective worker.

Procrastinators often fall into the trap of kidding themselves about their true nature. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they only have a couple of tasks instead of very many, they will stop getting distracted and will get those few tasks done. But when the to-do list is so small, the only way to avoid doing the few projects will be to do nothing. This is how a non-structured procrastinator becomes a couch potato.

 

So, We Never Do the Most Important Project? That Can’t Be Right!

Yes, you’ve noticed the problem emerging here. How about the important tasks at the top of the list? That’s a fair question, and it’s why Perry explains the need for a second step in the art of structured procrastination: Picking the right projects for the top of the list.

The ideal list-topping tasks have two key features based around self-deception: The top-of-the pyramid tasks must look like they have clear deadlines when really they don’t, and they need to appear to be incredibly important, even though they’re not.

The structured procrastinator uses one character flaw to offset the effects of another, so you need to use self-deception to get the most out of procrastination. Committing to tasks with exaggerated importance, while believing they’re important and urgent, clears the way to accomplish all of those apparently less-urgent tasks. As soon as another task comes around that seems more important (but actually isn’t), the task you’ve been avoiding suddenly looks more appealing, since you’re using it to avoid the newly dreaded project!

You can achieve anything in the world, as long as it is through avoiding something even more dreaded.

How can you put procrastination to work for you?

This post originally appeared on Interview Bull.

Image: Flickr

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