Researchers have independently identified the phenomenon of positive procrastination, although there’s some disagreement on what to call it. “Structured procrastination” is the preferred term of John Perry, a philosopher at Stanford who published a book about it last year. Admittedly, it’s not a long book (92 quite small pages), but give him credit: He got it done, and only 17 years after he identified the concept.
The key to productivity, he argues in “The Art of Procrastination,” is to make more commitments — but to be methodical about it.
At the top of your to-do list, put a couple of daunting, if not impossible, tasks that are vaguely important-sounding (but really aren’t) and seem to have deadlines (but really don’t). Then, farther down the list, include some doable tasks that really matter.
“Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list,” Dr. Perry writes. “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.”
You can also call this “productive procrastination,” the term used by Piers Steel, a psychologist at the University of Calgary. It’s his personal favorite of the dozens of techniques he cataloged while researching his 2011 book, “The Procrastination Equation.”
“For most of us, procrastination can be beaten down, but not entirely beaten,” Dr. Steel told me, describing how one of his scholarly papers on procrastination took him a decade to write. “My best trick is to play my projects off against each other, procrastinating on one by working on another.”
Dr. Steel says it’s based on sound principles of behavioral psychology: “We are willing to pursue any vile task as long as it allows us to avoid something worse.” He gives theoretical credit to Sir Francis Bacon, the 17th-century philosopher, whose self-control strategy was to “set affection against affection, and to master one by another; even as we use to hunt beast with beast.”
At the very least, you can use it to stop feeling so bad about a problem that everyone shares. It’s certainly a saner strategy than the bromide about never putting off until tomorrow what you can do today. By that logic, you’d never stop working — there’s always something that could be done today.
Better to follow Dr. Perry’s rewritten version: Never do today any task that may disappear by tomorrow.