Ctrl+K

Introduction

Introduction#

Too long; didn’t read

The to-do list for procrastinators is designed to foster structured procrastination, where the procrastinator procrastinates by doing meaningful, deliberately selected tasks. The procrastinator needs to maintain an executive to-do list which:

  1. is long and diverse enough that one will be tempted to procrastinate on one task by doing another task of the executive to-do list;

  2. is short enough not to be anxiety provoking.

A series of additional to-do lists are there to help organize the mass of tasks across various projects, and quickly identify good tasks to add in the executive to-do list whenever a spot becomes vacant.

Welcome to the “to-do list for procrastinators”, an approach to getting things done specifically designed for procrastinators. The method is inspired by the little red book on structured procrastination by the Stanford Professor in Philosophy[1].

The first section will provide you with a bit of context about how the to-do list for procrastinators came into existence, as well as the major inspiration behind its design. In the second section, you will learn how the to-do list for procrastinators actually works. If you do not care about context, and feel you know more than enough about procrastination already, you should skip through section one, and start right away with section two.

The third and last section actually asks the hard question: why do procrastinators actually procrastinate? The to-do list for procrastinators is more of a band-aid than a remedy, a tool designed to assist people suffering from procrastination rather than an attempt to reduce the root causes of procrastination itself. The third section offers a theory on the origins of procrastination, and speculates about a number of long term solutions which follow from that theory.

Warning

The theory in section three is very much unproven, and the solutions are very much untested. Read that third section at your own risks. But I feel that the theory is appealing enough to be exposed.

CC BY 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except for the logo, which was purchased with rights for unlimited web distribution by P. Bellec from shutterstock ID 1427368160, and the image of Celeste, which is a Fan-art by GomiGomiPomi reproduced with permission from the author (Usage of my drawings is allowed as long as proper credits are given and it’s not for commercial purposes).