Book summary “The art of procrastination”: summary

Introduction

You likely view procrastination as a moral failing that ruins your productivity and fills you with guilt. Society tells you to overcome this flaw through sheer willpower, time management apps, and relentless discipline. John Perry argues that you should stop fighting your nature and learn to work with it instead.

Structured procrastination converts a negative trait into a powerful engine for high productivity by channeling avoidance into marginally useful tasks.

You will learn how to harness avoidance, organize your tasks, and manage distractions without changing your personality. This book explores several key questions to help you master this new approach.

• How can you make procrastination work for you instead of against you?
• What strategies help you triage tasks and build psychological momentum?
• How do you handle digital distractions and horizontal workspaces?
• When do delayed tasks disappear entirely?

1. The Core Philosophy of Structured Procrastination

Procrastination is commonly viewed as a crippling flaw. People who delay tasks often feel lazy, disorganized, and deeply inadequate. You might spend hours rearranging your desk or cleaning the kitchen instead of writing a report.

Structured procrastination transforms procrastinators into effective human beings by turning a negative trait into a productive engine.

Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing. Instead, they do marginally useful things as a way of not doing something more important. You can harness this behavioral quirk by changing how you view avoidance.

The strategy relies on a carefully arranged to-do list. When you put urgent and intimidating projects at the top, you create a psychological trap for yourself. You will eagerly tackle worthwhile tasks lower down just to avoid the top items.

• Order your list of tasks by importance, with urgent tasks on top and worthwhile tasks lower down.
• Pick projects for the top of the list that seem to have clear deadlines but really do not, and seem awfully important but really are not.

While serving as resident fellows in Soto House at Stanford, the author would play Ping-Pong with students or read the newspaper as a way of avoiding more important professorial tasks, thereby earning a reputation as an unusually dedicated and caring faculty member.

This trick allows you to maintain high productivity while still avoiding the dread of top-priority duties. The illusion of urgency keeps your momentum high.

In 1996, The Chronicle of Higher Education published the essay Structured Procrastination. The concept resonated with academics and professionals across the globe.

In 2011, the author was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for Literature for his essay. You do not need to cure your procrastination to succeed. You just need to structure it properly.

2. Psychology and Daily Execution Tools

Perfectionism creates paralyzing fantasies that require careful task triage, while daily to-do lists and rhythmic music build psychological momentum.

Procrastinators mistakenly believe that being a perfectionist implies having completed a task perfectly in the past. Perfectionism is actually a matter of fantasy rather than reality. When given a task, you imagine receiving immense praise for a flawless execution. This creates an intimidating barrier to actually starting.

Only when the deadline approaches and fantasies of utter failure replace fantasies of perfection do you finally snap into action and produce a perfectly adequate result.

A woman named Mistress Imelda wrote to the author explaining how her perfectionism regarding an unfinished novel trilogy, a leather fetish gear company, paintings, and a demo album causes her to sort paintbrushes and organize computer space instead of starting her actual projects.

You can manage this trap through deliberate choices:

• Practice task triage by analyzing the costs and benefits of doing a less-than-perfect job at the moment you accept a task.

The primary purpose of a daily to-do list is not to remind you what to do. It gives you the psychological lift of checking off completed tasks. By breaking daunting tasks down into smaller increments, you gain psychological momentum and start thinking of yourself as a doer and accomplishor. Lists should include simple early actions and even do-not reminders to prevent derailment.

The author's morning to-do list includes simple items like turning off the alarm, getting out of bed, making coffee, and sitting at the desk rather than the couch. This allows him to check off items immediately and build momentum.

Organize your days using structured tools:

• Make a to-do list before going to bed the night before and leave it by the clock.
• Break big daunting tasks into smaller, less demanding subtasks, taking them bird by bird.
• Include do-nots along with dos on the to-do list, such as avoiding email or web surfing.

Procrastinators often suffer from bouts of depression that reinforce their procrastination. While the mood of the blues might draw someone toward depressing music, listening to perky, rhythmic, or energizing classic songs can break the spell. This provides the physical lift needed to get moving.

The author cites Johnny Cash's Get Rhythm, The Music Man's Seventy-six Trombones, and Lacy J. Dalton's Black Coffee as songs that use infectious rhythms to energize listeners despite morose lyrics.

Configure your environment with musical cues:

• Choose a perky radio station or build a playlist of upbeat, energizing songs the night before when you are in a good mood.
• Set an alarm clock or clock radio a fair distance from your bed with the volume turned up high.
• Use the length of your favorite CD or a custom playlist to pace large cleaning tasks like the garage.

3. Managing Workspaces and Digital Distractions

Horizontal organizers require adapted workspaces to thrive, and digital tools like email require strict boundaries to prevent endless procrastination rabbit holes.

Vertical organizers neatly file away folders in tall cabinets. Horizontal organizers need all their ongoing projects spread out on a surface in front of them where papers can beckon you to continue. Putting a project into a file means it will never be looked at again.

The author compares horizontal organization to being left-handed in a lecture hall designed with right-handed fold-up desks. You are subjected to an unnecessary situational disadvantage in a world built for vertical filing cabinets.

Your office needs dimensions and furniture adapted to this horizontal style:

• Build an office measuring 16 by 16 feet.
• Install a giant rotating lazy Susan office desk with a diameter of 15 feet.
• Use filing cabinets strictly for storing finished projects you never plan to look at again, or for papers you would feel too guilty to throw away immediately.

Computers offer instant deadline delivery. They are also a major bane for procrastinators due to the temptations of email and web surfing. Email accumulates into endless in-boxes that mirror the old piles of unread letters. Following hyperlinks leads to hours of wasted time down rabbit holes of irrelevant information.

The author once left a UCLA graduate school admission file unread at the back of a desk. The applicant never heard back, started a successful modem company, and later thanked the author by giving a top-of-the-line 1200-baud modem.

Protect your time from digital traps with strict physical and mental boundaries:

• Start web sessions only when a natural interruption is guaranteed, such as when you are hungry or need to use the restroom.
• Unplug your laptop before starting email so the spell breaks when the battery dies.
• Set an alarm clock to interrupt web surfing after an hour.

4. Collaboration, Fringe Benefits, and Annoying Habits

Teaming up with nonprocrastinators provides external deadlines, delayed tasks often disappear entirely, and disciplined procrastinators avoid harming others.

Nonprocrastinators naturally start tasks early and follow strict schedules. This behavior forces the structured procrastinator to get things done. You might have to work quite hard, but this partnership prevents you from delaying indefinitely.

The author collaborated with Stanford colleague Ken Taylor on the public radio show Philosophy Talk. Taylor pushed to secure funding, make a pilot, and organize weekly broadcasts.

When you work with a nonprocrastinated partner, follow specific rules:

• Compliment your collaborators on the good work they are doing.
• Ensure they know you are aware of all they accomplish while you are procrastinating.
• Use your skills as a structured procrastinator to do relatively unimportant tasks they might never get around to.
• Buy lunch.
• Play some music.
• Keep them happy.

Two structured procrastinators can successfully accomplish joint projects as long as their working timelines and the tasks they avoid line up reasonably well. Procrastinators working together might miss initial target dates. They can still complete substantial projects through mutual pacing.

The author successfully coauthored the book Critical Pragmatics with Basque philosopher Kepa Korta, finishing only about a year later than planned.

Collaborators with unique quirks can still form productive partnerships if each person's working style naturally complements the other's flaws. A collaborator whose mind constantly jumps between complex objections and digressions can successfully produce finished work when paired with someone who loses focus after the initial thoughts and completes the most plausible line of reasoning. The author works effectively with computer scientist David Israel, who suffers from what the author diagnoses as right-parenthesis deficit disorder.

Delaying tasks saves time because circumstances change, requirements alter, or other people end up doing the work.

A major fringe benefit of structured procrastination is that tasks positioned near the top of a priority list often disappear entirely if delayed. Other people might end up doing the work instead, rendering your early labor completely unnecessary.

The author delayed writing a reference letter for a former student, who had earned his PhD a dozen or so years earlier. He found out later that the prospective employers requested references directly after initial screening, saving him from writing the letter altogether. In 2011, the movie Melancholia was released and the San Francisco Giants were eliminated from the pennant race.

Waiting before jumping into a project allows situations to mature. You gain useful information and let other people handle complex technical evaluations. Procrastinating on consumer purchases or complex information-gathering tasks lets experts do preliminary research.

Instead of researching printers immediately at a store, the author waits to discuss options with a knowledgeable colleague or neighbor. You should avoid falling into the trap of viewing procrastination as a heroic trait instead of a manageable flaw. Pat Suppes observed that happy people often take inventory of their flaws and adopt a value code treating them as virtues.

Procrastinating on minor administrative requests from a spouse is often an immature attempt to prove autonomy. Delaying mundane tasks when prompted by a partner is usually driven by a desire to resist being controlled. The author spent about fifty years demonstrating this pattern of spousal reminders about household bills.

Arrogant academics who dismiss ordinary rules are a different subspecies from humbler structured procrastinators. Structured procrastinators calculate precise deadlines to avoid causing real harm to students or colleagues. The author calculates the exact extra half-day he can miss grade-reporting deadlines without causing inconvenience to his students, ensuring he never crosses that absolute line.

10 Key Ideas

1. Structured procrastination converts a negative trait into a powerful engine for high productivity by channeling avoidance into marginally useful tasks.
2. Perfectionism creates paralyzing fantasies that require careful task triage, while daily to-do lists and rhythmic music build psychological momentum.
3. Horizontal organizers require adapted workspaces to thrive, and digital tools like email require strict boundaries to prevent endless procrastination rabbit holes.
4. Teaming up with nonprocrastinators provides external deadlines, delayed tasks often disappear entirely, and disciplined procrastinators avoid harming others.
5. You can harness avoidance, organize your tasks, and manage distractions without changing your personality by ordering your to-do list with important tasks on top and worthwhile tasks lower down.
6. The primary purpose of a daily to-do list is not to remind you what to do, but to give you the psychological lift of checking off completed items and building momentum.
7. Listening to perky, rhythmic, or energizing classic songs can break the spell of morose moods and provide the physical lift needed to get moving.
8. Protect your time from digital traps by starting web sessions only during natural interruptions and unplugging your laptop before answering email.
9. A major fringe benefit of structured procrastination is that tasks positioned near the top of a priority list often disappear entirely if delayed because other people end up doing the work.
10. Humbler structured procrastinators calculate precise deadlines to avoid causing real harm to students or colleagues, unlike arrogant academics who dismiss ordinary rules.