A Universal Law of Procrastination (2016)
I must be an atypical procrastinator then, because I only procrastinate activities that are less pleasant than others but have no deadline at all. If there is a deadline, I tend to do the work as early as possible, usually much earlier than my colleagues, so the pressure goes away and I can procrastinate about the activities whose time I self-manage again. I've found out over the years that the #1 reason for delaying self-managed tasks is that they are too big, appear like huge obstacles, which causes me to turn to the easy and fun creative parts of other tasks. Divide-and-conquer works fine to alleviate this problem, and I also use a bit of GTD when I'm stressed in order to increase the time available for slacking. Needless to say this only applies to activities that are slightly unpleasant, there are also aspects of my work that don't cause me to procrastinate at all.There seem to be different types of procrastinators, or at least two of them: those that procrastinate when they have to manage time themselves those that procrastinate when there are fixed deadlines. I've never understood the second type, to be honest. If you have a deadline, why not just do it quickly, so you're done with it?