How to Make Procrastination Work for You

11/20/2017

My house is never so clean as when there’s some major big desk project I want to avoid. The project will get done by its due date – decades of freelancing instill that habit – and meanwhile whole closets get organized if I’m procrastinating really hard.

Stanford philosopher John Perry suggests that procrastinators quit trying to reform or clear their calendars. Instead, draw up a ranked list of things you have to do, with the most urgent at the top. The top one won’t get done, but you’ll throw yourself into other worthwhile things to avoid it. Eventually something even more urgent will come up, and you’ll turn to the previous top-ranked priority as a way to procrastinate on the new one.

“At this point, the observant reader may feel that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is, in effect, constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself,” Perry writes. For his answer to this and other details of his method, click here to read his entertaining and instructive article.

4 Comments

Lisa

11/20/2017 09:14:46 am

Yeah, this was moderately entertaining. But as the person who is in the sometimes annoying position of bieng given a deadline by a client, and then having difficulty meeting the deadline because the client isn't meeting their own deadlines for the project (send me copy, provide me with images), I chuckled less than I might have otherwise. His section on not submitting the book list would be his equivalent task. If no one else is getting their essays done for the book, either, oh well. The book won't get published this year after all. But students need their books. That's a more egregious degree of procrastination.

Then I got to this sentence toward the end. "One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent."

I read "inflated importance" to apply to "oneself," not the task! And "while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent" to apply to — oneself! When of course he's referring to the task, not oneself at all.

But it did make me wonder briefly if there's a bit of a control drama going on there sometimes, and/or if there's a connection to some other personality disorder.

Of course we're talking here about procrastinating performing familiar tasks, such as writing for you and him. Sometimes my clients (and I too) procrastinate because we really don't know how to start the project. (But is that genuinely procrastination or just ... coasting for a bit?)

Where did I read this recently (which I've read before): (To get something done) you don't need to know how to do the whole project. You only need to know how to do the first step. So, sometimes I break the project down into very teensy baby steps and try to accomplish the first one, such as create a folder on my computer, and maybe even an empty InDesign document the approximate size of the final job, and maybe put the client's logo on the first page... Voila! I'm on my way!

Sarah link

11/21/2017 10:04:48 am

Love applying the "inflated importance" and "important and urgent" to the procrastinator rather than the task! And when the procrastination keeps others from meeting their commitments, it smacks of hubris.

It's my impression that academic norms may be different from those you and I work with - allowing more delay to get every word right. In my world, and possibly yours, it's sometimes necessary to accept "good enough" in order to meet a timetable.

The procrastination I commit has to do with putting off things that have no fixed due date, that I don't look forward to doing, like making a difficult phone call. The only real problem created by putting it off is that it's hanging over my head that much longer. I'm likely to do it, to be able to scratch it off the list, sometime when I don't hate the idea as much as I was hating it previously. So in fact the "procrastination" is pretty efficient in fitting tasks to mood or energy level.

As you say, there's the procrastination of not starting because I don't know what to do. There again, I'll face it when the mood or energy level is right, or when the pain of anticipating it exceeds the pain of facing it. Generally at that point, either it turns out to be not so difficult ("So why did I put myself through all that worry?") or it's so complex that one baby step at a time is the only way ("No wonder I kept putting this off!").

11/21/2017 10:33:56 am

Sarah. Perfect. Perfect in every word. Thank you. Fitting procrastination to mood or energy level isn't genuine procrastination. It's the right way to get through the day/week. It's more mindful.

11/21/2017 01:52:35 pm

A Facebook friend wrote, "It's not procrastination. It's waiting for the right time." For me it's being more mindful, or waiting for the right time, when the "not now" decision is calm and intentional. It's procrastination when I'm beating myself about about it, which rarely does much good.

How to Make Procrastination Work for You

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