The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging, and Postponing, or, Getting Things Done by Putting Them Off - John Perry

Written by John Perry
Format: MP3

Written by: John Perry
Narrated by: Brian Holsopple
Length: 1 hr and 48 mins

Format: Unabridged

Release Date:08-29-12
Publisher’s Summary

John Perry’s insights and laugh-out-loud humor bring to mind Thurber, Wodehouse, and Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit. This charming and accessible audio educates, entertains, and illuminates a universal subject. Procrastinators will be relieved to learn that you can actually accomplish quite a lot while procrastinating. In fact, the book itself is the result of Perry avoiding grading papers, refereeing academic proposals, and reviewing dissertation drafts. It also has a practical side, offering up advice that listeners can put to use. Who knew that placing “Learn Chinese” at the top of your to-do list would inspire you to get the less monumental tasks below it done?

Witty, wise, and beautifully written, The Art of Procrastination will make the perfect gift for the untold number of lollygaggers out there.
“Doing everything except what you should”

What did you love best about The Art of Procrastination?

My brother once said, “Did you ever notice how everything is more interesting when you have homework looming? Even bad TV?” Well this short book discusses why that is. It will get you thinking about your procrastinating and when you are likely to do it.
You know better. Still you persist.
I found this discussion of putting-things-off humorous, honest and real. It does not make lists of helpful tools so you can cure your bad habit. Instead the author just assumes that you procrastinate and will continue to do so. And the discussion goes from there. For some reason that works for changing my habits more than those hokey “you should” books. This book is as long as a movie. Once started, I didn’t procrastinate. I listened to the entire book in one evening. It was fun and thought provoking and I think helpful.
“Great read for a time-management nerd like me.”

Lighthearted, but actually dispensing real and good advice on time management, Perry lays out a method for getting stuff done while procrastinating (“structured procrastination”). For $1.95, a real bargain and not bloated in the way an actual self-improvement book, presumably written by a non-academic philosopher, would be. There’s some great insights here. E.g., a short to-do list is a bad idea for the procrastinator; with so few options to put off, the procrastinator ends up doing nothing. But with a thick and detailed to do list, the procrastinator has the option of putting off the first few items in order to accomplish other items on the list.

Self-improvement books about time management are one of my guilty pleasures. I also have a background (long ago) in academic philosophy. Probably not a surprise, then, that I was really tickled by Perry’s short book. This is a great starter on the topic and not much of a time commitment.

Some quick thoughts about other treatises on this topic:

*Tony Robbin’s Awaken the Inner Giant. Clearly, if you’re going to read this, you’ll need to hide that fact from your friends and family and strangers on the bus. This book ought to be made with a fake War and Peace cover. While you keep telling yourself that you’re only reading it ironically, you’ll quietly be admitting that there’s fantastic advice. Robbins is probably the best on techniques to transform the procrastinator’s proclivity for avoiding the top of the to-do list (whereas Perry simply concedes that procrastination may be a fact of your nature). Having said that, I’m not admitting I’ve ever read any Tony Robbins.

*David Allen’s Getting Things Done. It’s probably the best with an ultra-detailed information, task, and time-management system. Unlike Perry, Allen is a bit soup-nazi-esque.

*Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, etc etc. This book often appears on Amazon or Audible as recommended if you like David Allen. It’s really junk. Short little essays and, for the bigger names, Q and As, that all are little more than advertisements for other books, blogs, and the like.

*How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day. Written like a hundred years ago, but you wouldn’t realize that from just reading it. And you can read it in an hour.

*Josh Kaufman’s the First Twenty Hours. Kaufman and Perry, though from different angles, show you how the desire for perfection can lead to procrastination. If you want your output to be perfect, it can paralyze you from ever starting the project. But Kaufman’s thesis is that it only takes 10 – 20 hours of deliberate practice to become enjoyably competent at a new skill. By the way, I really do not recommend Kaufman’s book.

*The Spirit of Kaizen. Perry references this one. I don’t recommend it because its 180 pages that repeat the same core idea. But, that core idea is helpful – small changes can have huge effects; make the smallest possible change that will improve a process. Then repeat.
“So Enjoyable!”

I loved this audiobook. The information presented is humorous, but practical. I loved the personal stories as they served to remind me, ‘Hey! I’m not THAT bad!’. Even while dealing with procrastination in a funny way, Mr. Perry still managed to help you see how you can move your projects along and that you still might be doing productive things…maybe just not THE thing you need to do. It’s a nice way to make you feel good about yourself when you’re beating yourself up for not being as busy as you’d like to be.

The narrator did a great job and it was a pleasure to listen to him.

I will look for other works from both author and narrator.

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