Get things done with structured procrastination - Lifehacker

Stanford philosophy professor John Perry describes how he manages to be a productive procrastinator by structuring his to-do list to compensate for procrastination.

Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things… [b]ecause 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.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact.

Structured procrastination, as the author suggests, means that you intentionally place items at the top of your list that aren’t actually all that important so that you end up getting all sorts of things done while avoiding the “important” tasks at the top of your list. This method sounds an awful lot like setting your alarm clock a half hour fast so that you can get places on time, which seems to really do wonders for some people.

The whole setting your watch forward thing seems to stupid to me. The only people I know who do that, end up assuming that they set it forward more than they actually did - they end up even later.

I'm a big fan of fooling myself. But I am skeptical about how well this structured procrastination would work. Still, I might just give it a try.