Structured Procrastination, by John Perry

CHAPTER ONE

 
I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, a National Science Foundation proposal to referee, and dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they accomplish and the good use they make of time.

(Or at any rate I rediscovered it. In 1930 Robert Benchley wrote a column for the Chicago Tribune titled “How to Get Things Done,” in which he stated that “anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.” As that quotation shows, Benchley saw the fundamental principle—and I assume other profound thinkers who were structured procrastinators like he was have noticed the same thing. Someday I’ll do some further research.)

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 procrastinating 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. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him to do it. The procrastinator can be motivated to do 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 even written down somewhere, you have a list of 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 down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

The most perfect situation for structured procrastination that I ever had was when my wife and I served as resident fellows in Soto House, a Stanford dormitory. In the evening, faced with papers to grade, lectures to prepare, committee work to be done, I would leave our cottage next to the dorm and go over to the student lounge and play Ping-Pong with the residents, or talk over things with them in their rooms, or just sit there and read the newspaper. I got a reputation for being a terrific resident fellow and one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a setup—playing Ping-Pong as a way of not doing more important things and getting a reputation as Mr. Chips.

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be, by definition, the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.
At this point you may be asking, “How about the important tasks at the top of the list that one never does?” Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.

The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics. First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don’t). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren’t). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I’m sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take, for example, the item at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume on the philosophy of language. It was supposed to have been done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn’t much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won’t come along. Then I’ll get to work on it.

Another example is book order forms. I write this in June. In October I will teach a class on epistemology. The book order forms are already overdue at the bookstore.
It is easy to take this as an important task with a pressing deadline. (For you nonprocrastinators, I will point out that deadlines really start to press a week or two after they pass.) I receive almost daily reminders from the department secretary; students sometimes ask me what we will be reading; and the unfilled order form sits right in the middle of my desk, right under the empty potato chip bag. This task is near the top of my list; it bothers me and motivates me to do other useful but superficially less important things. But, in fact, the bookstore is plenty busy with forms already filed by nonprocrastinators. If I send mine in by midsummer, things will be fine. I know that I will order well-known books from efficient publishers; I always do. And no doubt I will accept some other, apparently more important, task sometime between now and, say, the first of August, at which point my psyche will feel comfortable about filling out the order forms as a way of not doing this new task.

The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, because one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that these tasks are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deception skills. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the negative effects of another?