Procrastination

I'm writing this blog because I don't want to write my graduate school application essays. They're due in a matter of hours and....well, let's say they could use some work. It's not that I haven't been working on them. I have been hacking away at them, at a rate of roughly twenty words per hour, for the last week. My coup de grâce is that finished or not, I will have to submit them by tomorrow.

I was lamenting my procrastination on Twitter when a friend sent me an article by Stanford Philosophy Professor John Perry entitled "Structured Procrastination." Perry's main argument is that procrastinators can get a hell of a lot done. It's just a matter of ordered self-deception:

The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like 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 do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

[....]

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 right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be 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.

[....]

The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since 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 they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?

The problem with applying Structured Procrastination to my life is that I have a Twitter and Tumblr account, black holes that can suck up hours of time, especially when there is a task that is more important. Which is every task.

Cory Doctorow might have the antidote in his essay, "Writing in the Age of Distraction."

The jury's still out.