Place an important-seeming but deferrable task at the top of your list

Put a compelling but non-urgent task first, so everything below it gets done in avoidance of it.

Why it works

Procrastinators do not actually do nothing — they do other things to avoid the top-priority item. Perry’s insight is that this avoidance motivation is a reliable energy source that can be redirected. If the "avoided" task is carefully chosen (real but not time-sensitive), the avoidance behavior produces genuine output rather than mere distraction. The mechanism is a kind of motivational judo: instead of fighting the avoidance impulse, you steer it.

How to do it

1. Identify a task that feels important and looming but has no true near-term deadline.
2. Place it visibly at the top of your list or board.
3. Populate the list below it with genuinely useful tasks you also need to do.
4. Allow yourself to work on anything on the list except the top item.

Evidence

This practice derives from Perry’s philosophical essay; there are no controlled trials. The psychological mechanism (avoidance motivation redirected) is plausible and consistent with what is known about procrastination as task-switching for relief. Steel’s (2007) meta-analytic review frames procrastination as a self-regulatory failure driven by low task value and delay, grounding why a low-appeal top item reliably diverts effort. (anecdotal)

This approach works best for people with a specific procrastination profile: those who are avoidance-motivated but task-capable. It does not address the causes of procrastination and may allow genuine urgent priorities to be indefinitely deferred.

Sources

• Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94.

Common mistake

Choosing a genuinely critical, time-sensitive task as the decoy — which does not reduce guilt or produce output, it just delays something urgent while doing something less important.