I bet I could procrastinate about doing this too.
Remember that the list can't be the most important thing, as the success is not guaranteed.
I think this habit has a couple of interesting results for me: - The amount of stress I feel--and the amount of time I spend "working"--does not go up linearly with workload. I am doing roughly twice as much (in terms of course credit and part-time work) as I was last year, and my classes are harder, but I feel maybe 1.3 times as much stress and still have an effectively similar amount of leisure time. - I am much more efficient than I would have been otherwise. There are two reasons for this: I give myself less time to do things but still finish them and I sometimes procrastinate by learning my tools (keyboard shortcuts, emacs-fu...) and by automating things I do regularly (writing bash scripts or emacs extensions).
Ultimately I do not view my procrastination as nearly as big a problem as others make it out to be. I think I'm happier and more efficient for it; I suspect that I would actually have accomplished less had I not procrastinated all these years.
Of course, this is probably just a result of confirmation bias (I like procrastinating, I think it helps me so I only see the cases where it does) but I don't really care--it works for me.
The point is, making such a list of tasks to do would simply give me something else to avoid entirely. I might even progress to having lists of lists of tasks.
I realise this article isn't serious, but it's interesting to consider. I could never make it work, because pandering to procrastination like this would just engender further procrastination and further doing of things which can seem important but are really utterly unimportant.
There is almost always something you would rather be doing than what you are doing right now.
For instance, in the article he talks about how he "has" to publish his reading list at the start of the summer and how he puts it off a couple of months because he thinks it isn't really important. That's nice, but maybe the students who want to sort out their books or even do some reading over the summer and the hard working people in the admin office and bookshop disagree. "I got almost daily reminders from the department secretary; students sometimes asked me what we would be reading;" Sounds like his procrastinating on this caused problems for others.
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~bender/newpub/2007-BenderClTs-JoS-...
Well worth a read when you've got something else you're putting off.
If only I could convince myself all of the onerous tasks at work were low priority...
