My wife just asked me if I have booked that flight yet. When I get home, she will ask me if I have submitted my expenses yet. The answer to both is no – because I was reading this.

Of course, she won’t read that because she is not a procrastinator and doesn’t understand how procrastinators work so I’ll quote a little bit for her:

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. 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. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, 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.

Jeff will have read it already because he has more important things to do and, when he asks me if I am done with that report yet? I will say no because I was writing this blog.

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.)

The non-procrastinators among you

 may be asking, “How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?”

To find out the answer, you’ll have to read the article. But, of course,  the procrastinators have already read it.