What do you think of John Perry's work: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

Hi,
I know John's work well, and I've posted on it previously and joined him on NPR for an interview last year (he's a great person and scholar). Yes, we can harness tasks we want to avoid to get us moving on other tasks, but as John notes, the key first step is to choose something that isn't really time urgent but to pretend that it is. In the case of Don's writing above, the task he was avoiding was important and urgent. More importantly, avoiding it didn't fuel other work, it just crippled him emotionally, and I think this is true for many people who procrastinate.
tim

John Perry: "The most perfect situation for structured procrastination that I ever had was when my wife and I served as Resident Fellows in Soto House, a Stanford dormitory.

In the evening, faced with papers to grade, lectures to prepare, committee work to be done, I would leave our cottage next to the dorm and go over to the lounge and play ping-pong with the residents, or talk over things with them in their rooms, or just sit there and read the paper.

I got a reputation for being a terrific Resident Fellow, and one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a set up: play ping pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips."

This doesn't seem to fit your analysis. John was ignoring important work to play ping pong. John is one of the scholars I know that could actually turn ping pong into a reputation enhancing move!

(On another note, could you set up a subscription to your posts as an option? I like to follow the comments but with over 500 RSS feeds, I don't return to every post I have ever made to see if there has been a reply.)

I've been reading "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing", a 1981 paper by Flower & Hayes. They seem to be exploring the necessary and sufficient conditions for writers' procrastination.

In this article, F&H talk about what they believe they have witnessed as the difference between the activities of good writers and poor writers. For them, it comes down to what they call "goal-directed thinking" which they claim is "intimately connected with discovery".

F&H continue by saying that "[a]ll those forces which might "guide" composing, such as the rhetorical situation, one's knowledge, the genre, etc., are mediated through the goals, plans and criteria for evaluation of discourse actually set up by the writer".

This would speak to engagement, methinks. They go on to describe the nature of the goals for a poor writer:

"Poor writers will frequently depend on very abstract, undeveloped top-level goals [...] even though such goals are much harder to work with than a more operational goal..."

This would speak to self-handicapping, no?

"[O]ne might predict that an important difference between good and poor writers will be in both the quantity and quality of the middle range of goals they create. These middle-range goals, which lie between intention and actual prose [...] give substance and direction to more abstract goals [...] and they give breadth and coherence to local decisions about that to say next."

I think that this is a really important thing for a writer to consider. Those interim and middle-range goals are tools for continual self-bootstrapping. It doesn't matter what you know about a topic... it's about how you explore your inquiry.

But check this out. F&H have also noted that the process of writing also enables people to discover something new about what they were writing, to the point that sometimes they must return and regenerate those top-level goals. "If the writer's topic is unfamiliar or the task demands creative thinking, the writers ability to explore, to consolidate the results and to regenerate his or her goals will be a critical skill."

What I am now wondering is whether this is a necessary skill or a necessary state to attain in order to experience flow. Thoughts?