I am Always Late

Procrastination is among the most common causes behind being always late. Procrastinators are those people who tend to find out millions reasons for not doing something they do not want or like doing. For example, they can start doing house chores instead of preparing a report or writing articles for a scientific magazine. Procrastination is something related to prioritizing the tasks and figuring out what is important for us at that very moment. Prioritizing and our effectiveness in it is a criteria which allowed Dr. John Perry define such a phenomenon as structured procrastination.

In his articles, Dr. Perry opens secrets of structured procrastination as an art of making procrastination work for our benefit. According to him, regular procrastinators just avoid doing things and are rarely busy with some really useful things and tasks. If they have something important to do, they’d rather do gardening or cleaning their apartment. Regular procrastination is linked to an irresistible desire to procrastinate with doing something very important, and there’s no procrastinator on earth who would go in for cleaning or gardening in case if those tasks are the most important for them for the moment.

Structured procrastination is a more complex thing. It is based on manipulating with the tasks of the top importance and the tasks which are a bit less important for the moment. At that, those who can find the balance perfectly well can earn much of success and recognition. Here’s an example: a teacher who gets sickened of getting ready for his lectures and checking out student’s essays chooses to spend a lot of time with his family and gains a reputation of a perfect father. He manages to keep up with his professional activities as well, however, usually spends only minimal efforts on that.

The specifics of structured procrastination is finding a moment when the most important tasks which the procrastinator tends to avoid doing, become less important and start having less meaning for the moment. For example, if you need to pick apples in October and November, but November is also the time for picking oranges, then for structured procrastinator picking apples in November will be a great deal! That is how it is possible to have things done in the framework of structured procrastination. And if you managed to master an art of “picking the right sorts of projects to the top of the list”, structured procrastination can work great and even bring more success to our life.