Stanford professor reveals the art of procrastination in new book

John Perry practices what he calls “structured procrastination,” a technique he’s honed over many years as a philosophy professor at Stanford University.

“My habit in life is to always be thinking about something a little bit different than I should be,” he said. “It leads to good results sometimes.”

Most recently it’s led to his newest book, “The Art of Procrastination,” a how-to guide for structuring and managing wasted time. The book itself came out of a 1,000-word essay Perry wrote on the topic.

“Rather than doing something else I should have been doing, I wrote a little essay,” he explained.

In 2011, that little essay won Perry an Ig Nobel Prize in Literature, a tounge-in-cheeck parody of the Nobel Prize. The annual awards recognize academic achievements that, as Perry describes, “first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

The prize gained Perry the attention of a literary agent who encouraged him to expand his original essay into a book.

“I pasted all this stuff together and gave him a draft of a book,” Perry said. “That is like most of my projects, only with the help of another, non-procrastinating person.”

Perry says procrastinating isn’t as bad as most people think. But acknowledging that it’s sometimes OK to put things off isn’t easy, especially for chronic procrastinators.

“One of the things that gets procrastinators in trouble is this idea that we all have free will,” Perry said. “And if we don’t have a strong will we’re some kind of crumb bum.”

In reality, Pretty adds, most people get through life by manipulating themselves with tools such as alarm clocks and to-do lists. He says procrastination is limited not by strength of will but by the context in which people put themselves. Even if they’re procrastinating on one task, they often get a lot done on another.

“I don’t claim procrastination is a good thing,” Perry said. “I’m happy to admit that it’s a flaw. It’s just that I don’t think people, for the most part, should feel quite as bad about it as they tend to.”