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Ahh, procrastination. The thing we all claim to hate but we seem to enjoy doing it so much, so much. It’s true though, procrastination often throws us into preposterous situations like starting a 14-page research paper two weeks after it’s due because your professor is starting to put the pieces together and is getting the sneaking suspicion you haven’t actually had mono all this time.

So obviously we need to control our procrastination to some degree. How do we do that? Some people advocate the “Just suck it up and get it done” approach. My response to that is, “Oh! Why thank you! I’ve never thought of that or tried that before because I am both debilitating lazy and stupid.”

These kind of “get it done” people are inclined to quote Abraham Lincoln, who said something about procrastination that I’m going to attempt and paraphrase:

“Don’t put work off until tomorrow, blah blah blah, you have plenty of time to get it done today, some people are convinced I wouldn’t have ended slavery if it weren’t for a specific combination of sociopolitical factors and that makes me feel unappreciated, blah blah, get some stuff done this afternoon so you don’t have to worry about it when you go enjoy a nice night at the theater, blah blah blah, oh no I’ve been shot”

Something like that. Anyway the part that these motivational geniuses seem to leave out is that Abraham Lincoln had the choice of getting stuff done or reading “Hard Times” by Charles Dickens, which is basically 500 pages of the terrible lives of grimy British factory workers with nothing exciting about ghosts or Christmas. Abraham Lincoln did not have three new wall posts on his Facebook profile commenting on those awesome pictures of his Log Cabin Warming Double Kegger, he did not have a Netflix account which required him to finish the disc of Weeds he was watching so he could get Terminator 2 on Blu-Ray, and he didn’t have to deal with the overwhelming temptation to beat that fucking impossible Mario Strikers tournament.

Had we gone back in time and quickly given Abraham Lincoln an original Gameboy with Tetris, he probably would have spent the two months playing it and then, upon the Gameboy not working, used the rest of his live trying to reverse-engineer the double-A battery instead of preserving the union. This would probably have gone for any of those highly motivated historical figures of the past, so they can stop blabbering at us with their pithy quotes.

The key here is we’ve got a lot of amazing distractions in our modern world, and it’s unlikely we’re going to wake up one day and say they’re never again going to keep us from doing that stupid project on research methods we’re not ever going to use. For most of us, that’s just not going to happen.

The key is to build a big pyramid of procrastination. The thing you want to the do the least, like your massive research project, is at the top. Ideally it shouldn’t be due for a long time. Then you can put slightly less unappealing tasks below that, like catching up on notes for a class, or working on a homework assignment, or making sure Colin Jones doesn’t get on your ass for not writing something inane on your blog.

This way, as long as make sure you’re doing something productive everyday, you’ll reap the rewards through the pyramid of procrastination. As long as you do a little something each day, you’ll have the satisfaction of accomplishment and procrastination, and eventually you’ll have nothing good left to do but that damn paper.

This is a lot better than just promising yourself that this time you’ll be able to sit down and just get it done, and then spending two hours sending poorly photoshopped bumper sticker pictures to your friends on Facebook. You don't build a pyramid through poor, unfounded resolutions. You build it through measured, disciplined foundation-building. Or slave labor. But that would be wrong, and if you won't take my word for it, then keep that copy of Tetris the hell away from my time machine.