I begin, as ever with an inverted irony of sorts. I am procrastinating by writing about procrastination. It's like a vicar giving a sermon whilst buggering a donkey behind the font.

It's that wonderful time of year again where deadlines for dissertations, scripts and websites are politely making themselves apparent as very large and scary parts of the immediate future. So in the true nature of the self fulfilling prophecy i have chosen to ignore them and hope they go away, distracting my attention with things I'd much rather do than work. These include;

- Tidying my room
- Playing games
- Watching Crappy American Crime dramas (Numb3rs is awesome)
- Spending quality time with my girlfriend.
- Cleaning the house...

Now this got me thinking. When we procrastinate - we basically shift all of our 'like to do this' scales down, in accordance with the nastiness of the task assigned.
For example essays, or revision - when faced with them suddenly you think 'i'd rather clean my room than do this bullshit', and so do it. Heck, at least you've achieved something right?

Now roll with me on this - what if there was something more tedious than writing an essay? Lets say... trimming every hair in a living room carpet to the EXACT SAME LENGTH with a pair of toenail scissors. Suddenly the essay would become preferable - nay desirable. Heck I'd do an essay in a shot in that situation.

So can we harness the powers of procrastination for good? If the essence of it is simply knowing that there's something you'd much rather do now than whatever stinking task you've been assigned then we could do incredible things.
Scientists, faced with the eye bleedingly tedious task of counting the pimples in an average tesco employee's right cheek would - out of sheer boredom - devote themselves more to finding a cure for cancer.