Good news for procrastinators ( 拖延者) : There is a way to use procrastination to your advantage. Most procrastinators make the mistake of doing nothing at all. But when you use procrastination as motivation to get things done, you can avoid doing that one thing you really would rather not do and be quite productive. It's what essayist John Perry calls " structured procrastination" .
Let's say, for example, you have a number of tasks you are avoiding, in order of urgency: 1) Finishing an essay; 2 ) Responding to emails; 3 ) Cleaning and doing laundry. A non-procrastinator would accomplish these tasks in order of urgency. A procrastinator would avoid doing them altogether. But a structured procrastinator would do them in reverse ( 反向) -using his desire to avoid writing the essay as motivation to do cleaning and respond to emails. Since he can reprogram by working on other things that are still valuable, he is actually getting a lot done.
College senior Jordan Gonen is what you might call a structured procrastinator. When he is overcome with fear of homework, he'll preoccupy himself with what he calls " quick wins" - sending emails and writing articles for his blog. " It's still procrastinating my homework, but instead of doing nothing in the meantime, I'm still getting a lot done," Gonen says.
Once he gets through these tasks, Gonen can more easily get into the mindset of tackling his homework. " A lot of these smaller tasks aren't particularly fun or productive, but if you can really knock them out really quickly over a certain period of time, then you can get a lot more done and it doesn't feel necessarily worse-you're just working 100 percent on whatever you're working on," Gonen says.