> 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.
This is the reason this method has never really clicked for me, despite coming across the concept in various procrastination blogs. It's the more important tasks that need doing the most, and this method aims to avoid doing those in favour of less important tasks. Yes, the article acknowledges this:
> At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.
But the offered solution is to put fake important tasks to the top of the list: tasks which have deadlines and appear to be important but really aren't. I don't think the human brain is stupid enough to trick itself in this way. If I put a fake task at the top of my list, I'm going to know its fake (because I deliberately put it there for the reason that it's fake!), and it's going to be the actual important tasks which get neglected instead of the fake one.
Task selection is the tricky bit. It has to actually be important in some dimension. The easiest is something with an amount of social pressure. If someone is waiting for you to do something that you have promised, then it acquires a kind of urgency and importance even if it wouldn’t harm you not to do it in a timely manner.
It’s not fake importance, it’s just taking advantage of the fact that you want to be seen as dependable and effective to other people.
> If someone is waiting for you to do something that you have promised, then it acquires a kind of urgency and importance even if it wouldn’t harm you not to do it in a timely manner.
I don't agree with this though. If someone is waiting for me to do something that I've promised, and I don't do it, I'm going to suffer the harm of stress, guilt, shame, etc. related to breaking my promise and people thinking I'm unreliable. I think this idea only works if we define "harm" in a very narrow sense to exclude the types of harms that come from the "important" task that we're going to deliberately avoid doing.
You are correct. This strategy is not for making you happy with your procrastination. The main goal is to make you an effective human being. As a result, this excludes personal emotional effects from the definition of harm.
Furthermore, what an effective human is also something that you have to define for yourself.
Procrastination is considered a negative trait for a reason.
I mean, the crux of the problem is you might have a problem space where everything has a very, very strict, tight deadline. It’s not gonna work for that.
But this is simply not true in the real world. As the author notes, he has papers to grade and a mess of work to do in the evenings. These are important and have deadlines.
But the reality of the matter is that procrastinating them really doesn’t hurt anyone that much, and the benefit of just spending time with students is incredible.
If every problem is deeply important and has to be done yesterday, you wind up stretched very thin. It’s stressful!
I don’t think this is about creating a fake task at the top. It’s more about recognizing that it’s very frequently ok to procrastinate important things if you get value from what you did instead, and aiming to maximize that value. You’re tricking yourself, but in a way that fits how some procrastinators think. As he says, it relies on some level of self-deception.
And it should go without saying that there are obviously exceptions, and that it’s just one tool in the toolbox.
The part I'm not convinced about is that the self-deception actually works. In order to achieve it, I have to go through the thought process of "I have papers to grade and a mess of work to do which are important and have deadlines, but actually if I don't do them it won't hurt anyone". Once I go through that thought process, I now know that the task isn't genuinely important. Writing it down at the top of some list doesn't change what I know. Somewhere else on that list is the real important task (the one that will cause harm if I don't do it) and my brain knows which one it is and will try to procrastinate it.
This is the reason this method has never really clicked for me, despite coming across the concept in various procrastination blogs. It's the more important tasks that need doing the most, and this method aims to avoid doing those in favour of less important tasks. Yes, the article acknowledges this:
> At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.
But the offered solution is to put fake important tasks to the top of the list: tasks which have deadlines and appear to be important but really aren't. I don't think the human brain is stupid enough to trick itself in this way. If I put a fake task at the top of my list, I'm going to know its fake (because I deliberately put it there for the reason that it's fake!), and it's going to be the actual important tasks which get neglected instead of the fake one.