How to Procrastinate and still get things done

You'll be happy to know that this paper won the 2011 Ig Nobel prize for literature: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/30/us-nobel-spoof-idU...

This seems to reflect my experience perfectly--I think the only reason I get some things done is because I don't want to do other, ostensibly more important things.

I think this habit has a couple of interesting results for me: - The amount of stress I feel--and the amount of time I spend "working"--does not go up linearly with workload. I am doing roughly twice as much (in terms of course credit and part-time work) as I was last year, and my classes are harder, but I feel maybe 1.3 times as much stress and still have an effectively similar amount of leisure time. - I am much more efficient than I would have been otherwise. There are two reasons for this: I give myself less time to do things but still finish them and I sometimes procrastinate by learning my tools (keyboard shortcuts, emacs-fu...) and by automating things I do regularly (writing bash scripts or emacs extensions).

Ultimately I do not view my procrastination as nearly as big a problem as others make it out to be. I think I'm happier and more efficient for it; I suspect that I would actually have accomplished less had I not procrastinated all these years.

Of course, this is probably just a result of confirmation bias (I like procrastinating, I think it helps me so I only see the cases where it does) but I don't really care--it works for me.

On a similar note, I have productive things I can do no matter what mood I am. I always have a list of videos, books, blog posts, programs to write, things to plan, and puzzles to do so that no matter how I am feeling there is always something productive I can do.

I guess a procrastinator would have a hard time thinking about what are the important tasks what not .. Mr Professor might deem that he is a procrastinator, but I think he really is not ..

The author's website on structure procrastination:

http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

"begin by establishing a hierarchy of the tasks you have to do"

I bet I could procrastinate about doing this too.

The problem with actually implementing this system is that, after drawing up said list of things that need doing, I would simply go and find myself doing a bunch of other stuff, stuff which isn't on the list, but is capable of making itself seem important and worthwhile enough to me to keep me from feeling bad. Stuff like reading that book I bought a year ago, practising piano, reading articles about interesting stuff online, writing and then scrapping the opening few pages of a novel...

The point is, making such a list of tasks to do would simply give me something else to avoid entirely. I might even progress to having lists of lists of tasks.

I realise this article isn't serious, but it's interesting to consider. I could never make it work, because pandering to procrastination like this would just engender further procrastination and further doing of things which can seem important but are really utterly unimportant.

There is almost always something you would rather be doing than what you are doing right now.

Break big tasks into lots of small ones. Add a "carrot" that you reward yourself with each time you complete a small task.

Interesting, but the hard part of this is really knowing what is and isn't important.

For instance, in the article he talks about how he "has" to publish his reading list at the start of the summer and how he puts it off a couple of months because he thinks it isn't really important. That's nice, but maybe the students who want to sort out their books or even do some reading over the summer and the hard working people in the admin office and bookshop disagree. "I got almost daily reminders from the department secretary; students sometimes asked me what we would be reading;" Sounds like his procrastinating on this caused problems for others.

Or, as designed by academia and force-fed into the business structure, the PMBOK. http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Project-Management-Body-Knowledg...

This reminds me of a really quite wonderful paper: "Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators"

http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~bender/newpub/2007-BenderClTs-JoS-...

Well worth a read when you've got something else you're putting off.

John Perry's in depth talk about procrastination http://www.philosophytalk.org/shows/procrastination

I added "comment on procrastinator article at HN" to my list of things to do and gave it low priority.

If only I could convince myself all of the onerous tasks at work were low priority...

So when will we spend our time to do the important things? They are still the things you have to do but dont want to do.

There's just a problem when you have a "list" that goes like a circle.

I have a question? Can you fool yourself? Isn't it like ojects have kittleing yourself?