Make Procrastination Work for You

In honor of tax day, and the fact that I am filing an extension to file yet again, I thought I would write a post about procrastination. =)

Procrastination is frustrating, both to the perpetrator and to the more organized, less-procrastination-prone people around him/her. Nobody enjoys procrastinating, but I would argue that most people do it, especially now that the internet is there with all of its lovely tempting time wasters.

Sometimes, however, procrastination can be helpful. I read an article a while ago by John Perry, a professor who has come up with a way to turn his habit of procrastinating into a way of actually getting more things done. He wrote an essay explaining it here. [And can we just pause to appreciate the way he avoided doing countless unwanted tasks by writing an article on making procrastination work for you? Genius.] His theory, to give it a brief overview, is that you will eventually get all the things on your list done as long as you are doing some of the things you need to do while procrastinating others. [You should read the essay; it's funny and explains this much better than I'm doing.]

Let me give you an example from today. I have a mountain of coursework to do for my final seminary class. ALL of it is due next Friday. There's a lot of it (possibly because I procrastinated some of it all semester and have to catch up now). Some of it is due tonight at midnight. So instead of working diligently on it all day and finishing early, I cleaned out my office (which was really just a room filled with piles of stuff as of this morning) and my garage (which hadn't been cleaned in about 5 years and is now freakishly pristine). If you had said to me, "On Monday, you must clean out your office," I wouldn't have done it. But because I had something looming that I wanted to do even less than I wanted to clean out my office, it got done (well, and I had some amazing help).

That's the idea behind Perry's structured procrastination. You continually pile things onto your "to do" list, and you will eventually do all of the things on the list while you avoid doing the other things on the list. It's pretty brilliant.

I don't procrastinate about everything. I complete regular work tasks and general stuff-that-needs-to-get-done with occasionally astonishing efficiency. And there are some things that I jump on and finish long before they're actually due. But I think everyone procrastinates about some things, and this is a great way to get stuff done anyway.