Ijon’s post on how bursts of creative enthusiasm come up to distract him from the task at hand tied in with amazing synchronicity to this item that turned up in my feed reader, about the technique of Structured Procrastination. That article actually outlines a cunning strategy where, by cleverly structuring your task list, you can actually benefit from the natural tendency to avoid doing the urgent, important task by doing something (allegedly) less important. Oddly enough, I’ve actually done things like that, even at work. However, the synchronicity doesn’t stop here, because here’s a link describing the important idea of Yak Shaving, which is much more typical of how I actually go about my work:
You see, yak shaving is what you are doing when you’re doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you’re supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you’re doing to the original meta-task.