I'm a procrastinator and a list-maker. The tips below are perfect for someone like me. Which is good because I still need help working on my procrastination, even though it's gotten better over the years. These days, I don't have the time or luxury to avoid my needs, concerns, priorities. I gotta get things done! Somehow, these folks are itemizing my approach to procrastination. Looks like I've been headed in the right direction all along!
Great Tips from people who know things and have degrees:
1. Procrastinators all have excellent self-deceptive skills. (I agree. See my blog on "Bad Faith.")
2. They need to put this skill to work for them in a subtle way to actually make their procrastination work for them. As Perry puts it, "what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?" (In this case, using self-deception to offset the sins of procrastination.)
3. Given that we each always have a long list of tasks on our to-do lists with various levels of importance, urgency and aversiveness, we need to keep what appears to be an important task at the top of our list (one we also don't want to do) which really isn't that important or urgent (this is the slight self-deception part). Perry argues that this is quite easy. Our lives are full of these tasks. They seem important and appear to have fixed, urgent deadlines, but don't really.
4. With this task at the top of our list that we want to avoid, we will now engage in other tasks instead, because, as Perry notes, "Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they reorganize their files when they get around to it." (Did I say how much like this philosopher? He's funny too.)
5. The consequence of this careful strategizing with our to-do lists, is that in order to avoid that task at the top of our list, we now engage in other worthwhile tasks lower down on our list. Doing these things is the way we avoid doing the top thing, and Perry adds, "the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done."
"Nothing [is] so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task."--William James
