Structured procrastination

Created: 2022-04-29 23:12

Reference: Structured procrastination

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.

Procrastinating is doing anything else than what we should be doing. That can range from nothing or scrolling through TikTok¹ to doing something meaningful and productive that just isn’t the highest priority.

Procrastinators we then can take great advantage of that by treating our brains to think what we are doing isn’t the most important thing to do and that there’s always something more important on top of the to-do list.

Deadlines are a great way to trick our brains into thinking that something is important when it actually isn’t.

It is easy to take this as an important task with a pressing deadline (for you non-procrastinators, I will observe that deadlines really start to press a week or two after they pass.)

So the to-do of an structured procrastinator might look something like this.

1. Unimportant task with a pressing deadline. Which actually isn’t pressing but Hey! It has a deadline!
2. Some other pressing task
3. Yet another one
4. The task we want to actually get done
5. Another task we want to get done, it’s fine if we work on this one, the previous one or the next one
6. Another task we do want to accomplish

Footnotes §

1. It must be said that doing nothing and scrolling through TikTok are virtually the same, except one doesn’t ruin your brain. ↩