John Perry’s classic Chronicle essay, “How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done,” is as delightful to read in 2024 as it was in its year of publication: 1996 — which, strangely enough, also happens to be the last time I saw the legendary British band Oasis in concert. As a seasoned rhetorician, I am aware that correlation does not equal causation, but it just so happens that Oasis (fronted by two brothers who famously hate each other) have reunited. I even scored tickets for 2025, provided my ancient ears can handle it — and this got me thinking.
Just as the music scene has altered inexorably since I had a fake ID and a real nose ring, so, too, has the world surrounding terminally procrastinating academics.
Think about it. Back when Perry, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford University, described his theory of “structured procrastination,” all he had to distract himself from his research duties were Seinfeld, foosball, and dial-up internet. And yet, he still did an admirable job of avoiding work. In today’s world of nonstop distraction, we need Perry’s “theory” more than ever because — however tongue-in-cheek — it actually works.
In describing “the art of making this bad trait work for you,” he wrote: “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.”
The central tenet of Perry’s methodology is something I have often suggested to clients in my work as an academic-writing coach. Essentially, he recommended that you list the onerous tasks before you in order of importance, and then use your reluctance to do things at the top of your list as motivation to finish the “less important” things, which, of course, are also important.
But here’s the rub: Despite being a scholar with “a reputation for getting a lot done,” Perry admitted — in print — that he was 11 months behind on a peer-reviewed article. (I really hope it’s been submitted by now.) For many academics, an 11-month lag on a major project is highly relatable. While the climate, the technology, and the contours of my face (and very likely yours) show the brunt of the 28 years since Perry called himself out, what hasn’t changed is our terminal-procrastination tendency. Academic culture remains steadfastly broken — we manage to both get a lot done and be a year behind on our most important work. Being 11 months behind on a publication is a morally neutral act. But an entire culture that takes an 11-month delay for granted? That’s not a point of pride; it’s something that needs to be changed, forthwith.
I’m here to help. My updated version of “how to procrastinate and still get things done” is this: Instead of a year’s delay, aim to submit every project within (gasp) three months of its original due date. That may seem counterintuitive, since the world has gotten exponentially more distracting. But now more than ever, academics need to adapt our work culture to a much faster-paced world.
So let’s get to it. The core tenet of Perry’s non-peer-reviewed-but-nevertheless-legitimate methodology is to engage in benevolent self-deception and “cheat” on work with other work. For the habitual procrastinator, there are any number of ways to do this and get closer to the mythical three-month punctuality, but here’s what I recommend.
Set strict time limits for yourself. Start by realistically assessing your workweek. On which days can you afford to set aside a modest block of time for research and writing — from as little as 15 minutes to as much as 90? (Keep in mind: You do not need hours and hours of uninterrupted bliss to commune with Lady Intellect. That is a myth invented by male scholars in the 1950s so they could neglect their families.)
Now here’s the important part: You may only work on your research and writing during those blocks of times. Force yourself to have a clock-out time, and “forbid” yourself from doing any research-related work outside of those narrowly prescribed hours. Then enjoy bristling against those self-imposed restrictions. Let out a good old-fashioned, “You can’t tell me what to do!”
Et voilá, you are “cheating” on your plan by ignoring your edict and doing work that you might otherwise have procrastinated. You are shifting your brain from a bad habit (“I’ll work on that later”) to a good one (“I will do more work now — so there”).
Flip the teaching-research script. If you “literally don’t have” the 15 minutes I suggested above, guess what? You do. If you’re like most faculty members, you procrastinate on your research and not on your teaching obligations, because the latter have tangible deadlines and existential stakes. You can be a year late on a research paper, usually without serious career consequences. But if you did that with your students, you would lose your job.
So how, then, do you prioritize research when the conventional wisdom on faculty workload is that teaching duties keep you from getting anything done during the semester?
Carve off 15 to 30 minutes of your teaching-prep time. You will almost certainly not even notice, and neither will your students. Even if you do end up just a tiny bit underprepared for class, you will still be far more prepared than they are, and your teaching energy will have a fun jolt of urgency that I promise students will enjoy.
Embrace multitasking for the small stuff. Most people don’t want to work while they’re trying to relax, and generally I advise people not to sacrifice their vacations and free time to labor. Yet as academics, we all have plenty of busywork tasks that require low-to-medium levels of concentration — writing footnotes, formatting text and figures, creating charts. Those are all things that, while they need to get done someday, require a limited amount of focus.
So why not accomplish them while you’re watching murder docudramas on Netflix or listening to murder podcasts on Spotify? (Or, I guess, while consuming other types of hands-free media that don’t have anything to do with murder?)
Lie to yourself. Finally, I would like to circle back to something that Perry also emphasized — self-subterfuge and self-manipulation as key aspects of academic motivation and success.
My final suggestion is to go back to your list-in-order-of-onerousness. Take one or two of the big projects at the very top of the list and break them into smaller pieces. Rename those small tasks, discrete from their eventual whole. “Finish revisions on lit review that is now two years out of date so that I can finally submit this revise-and-resubmit that is, itself, now two years late” becomes “take 200 words of notes on each of three sources,” etc.
Then do your gosh-darnedest to pretend that you are working on a series of small, relatively easy tasks (of the sort that a high-level undergraduate could do). Any time you start to fret about the larger whole, just pretend it doesn’t exist. You, a procrastinator, have been doing that already, after all. Check on your progress in a month or so, and you will be shocked at how much you actually got done behind your own back.
If it seems too overwhelming to try all of these at once (or, more accurately, in succession), just choose the one that seems most attractive to you. If even making that choice triggers your decision fatigue, just close your eyes and point.
The important part here is that you forgive yourself for procrastination (because it’s not a moral failing) and reimagine your relationship to your own work in a way that accounts for procrastination rather than attempts to eradicate it in utter futility. Good luck to you, and to whomever updates this theory of productive procrastination in another 28 years — when, all deities willing, I’ll be blasting Oasis in the retirement home.
