Here’s an interesting essay on structured procrastination by John Perry, a philosophy professor at Stanford.

In the essay, Perry points the way forward to procrastinators like me:

“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.”

Structured procrastination, Perry said, is organizing your tasks to exploit the fact that “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.”

It’s a matter of picking the right set of tasks to be placed at the top of the list: tasks that “seem to have clear deadlines (but really don’t). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren’t).”

Finally, I see method to my madness.