A Structured Procrastinator

My roommate and I have been discussing a lot lately about techniques that we use to force ourselves to do stuff. You see, as a grad student whose adviser is not pushy at all and living in New York City, it's very hard to get yourself to work on your dissertation. There are no clear deadlines... or there are, but they just seem so far in time. Instead, there are so many things happening around you, it's hard to keep up!

Of course, when you start the fifth year of the program and job deadlines start to pass one after another, panic invades and years of procrastination start paying very high tolls. Not only you realize how behind you are in your work, but also it is hard to get rid of the habit of putting things off.

Today, Vero shared with me an article written in 1996 about Structured Procrastination. It can be more than 15 years old, but I find it as applicable today as it was back then. It basically sustains that procrastinators should have tons of things to do on their lists, to actually become a useful citizen of this world. Here is a paragraph that caught my eye in particular:

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 approach ignores 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 the way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

I can't tell you how many times I followed this flawed assumption. This semester, probably one of the most stressful ones of my whole program I decided to enroll in Italian. It's a 4-day, 1-hour per week course. It forces me to wake up early, I enjoy the class terribly, and it certainly fits the model that John Perry describes in his article.

Please don't stay only with this words and read the article. It's short and compelling.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, as part of my procrastinating activities of tonight, I googled John Perry and he is now an emeritus professor at Stanford. If we assume that he followed this philosophy at least partially for these last 15 years, it has definitely payed off.