In 1995 a Stanford philosophy professor named John Perry wrote an essay confessing his method for getting things done: procrastination. His observation, which later won him an Ig Nobel Prize and remains the funniest true thing in the productivity literature, was that procrastinators are rarely idle. They're often impressively busy, doing everything except the thing they're avoiding. So the trick, Perry argued, is to arrange your list so that the work you do while avoiding is work worth doing. Put a big, scary, slightly-inflated task at the top, and watch yourself productively demolish the list beneath it to stay away from it.
It's a joke that's also completely true, and I've watched it operate in myself for twenty years. Avoidance energy is real energy. The only question is where it discharges.
Why it works, mechanically
Underneath the comedy is sound psychology. Motivation runs partly on relief: the avoided task generates discomfort, and doing anything else discharges a little of it, which is why the fridge gets cleaned the week of the tax return. Perry's insight is that this engine doesn't care what the "anything else" is. Left unmanaged, it discharges into the trivial: tidying, scrolling, reorganising the reorganisation. Managed, it discharges into your second-tier real work, which is often substantial. The avoidance doesn't get cured. It gets aimed.
The dishonest version, and why it collapses
The method has a failure mode Perry himself acknowledged: it runs on a small self-deception. The decoy task at the top must feel urgent enough to flee from, while actually being safe to delay. Manage that carefully and the trick holds. Get sloppy and one of two things happens. Either the decoy was genuinely urgent, and you've now productively avoided something that's about to detonate. Or you learn to see through your own trick, the decoy loses its power, and the avoidance energy goes back to discharging into the fridge.
There's a third, quieter failure: using the method as a permanent alternative to ever doing the avoided thing. Some tasks survive months of structured avoidance and still need doing, and no amount of productive flinching gets them done. The method manages avoidance. It doesn't dissolve it, and pretending otherwise is where honest structure becomes elaborate hiding.
My twist: keep the energy, drop the self-deception
The version I'd defend doesn't need the trick. You don't have to inflate a decoy; you just need your avoidance to have somewhere real to land. Keep a visible bench of genuine second-tier work (the candidates from the top-three model), and when you're flinching from the big thing, flinch into the bench, deliberately and without shame. That's structured procrastination with the lying removed: no fake urgency, just an honest admission that today the main thing isn't happening, and a productive place for the energy to go.
The one non-negotiable is visibility. The avoided task stays on the board, in view, its deferral counted. Not as punishment: as information. Bump something five times and the pattern is telling you one of two true things: either it needs breaking into something less scary, or it was never actually a priority and deserves an honest deletion. Both are respectable outcomes. What's not respectable is the task quietly rotting somewhere you've arranged not to look.
How ka-do handles it
Ka-do won't solve your procrastination, and the product philosophy says so out loud; no app will, and the ones that claim to are selling guilt with better fonts. What it does is make the honest version of Perry's method the path of least resistance. The candidates bench gives avoidance a real landing zone, pre-agreed, one tap away. Unscheduled holds the deferred without shame or a red badge. And the bump count quietly names the pattern: this has moved five times. No lecture, no modal, no lock. A fact you have to see, and then a decision that stays yours.
Honesty clause: this post exists partly because I bumped a different post to write it. The bench works.
The one-line version
Procrastinators aren't idle; the energy is real. Aim it at genuine work, keep the avoided thing visible, and let the bump count tell you when the avoidance has become the answer. Aiming it well still needs a short list of what actually matters today, which is the whole case for picking three tasks instead of confronting the whole pile.
Ka-do gives your avoidance somewhere honest to land. Try it free →