In his recently published book, The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging, and Postponing, John Perry observes:

“All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this negative trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastination does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things such as gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it…The procrastinator can be motivated to difficult, timely, and important tasks, however, 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. In your mind, or perhaps written down somewhere, you have a list if things you want to accomplish, ordered by importance. You might even call this your priority list. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower on the list. Doing those tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure the procrastinator be comes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.”

One of these days, I may give some serious thought to these observations….

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John Perry is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford University. His essay “Structured Procrastination” won a 2011 Ig Nobel Prize in Literature and he was then able to complete the book by putting off grading papers and evaluating dissertation topics.