Anticipatory Procrastination
This work proposes an elegant solution to the general problem of getting stuff done, the well-known STUFF problem, and calls it anticipatory procrastination, finding empirical evidence that such an approach can work.
Abstract
Fundamental theoretical results demonstrate that many, no less than 92, things are hard. Moreover, things can be boring, unpleasant, or in the pathological case, both. To redistribute such effort away from humans was the field of computer science born, shifting effort to machines and grad students. To cut this Gordian Knot of “having to do stuff”, we propose an elegant solution: “Not doing it today”. We call our technique anticipatory procrastination . While this may seem an unintuitive approach, we feel we’ve solved this; it seems reasonable at a high level. We’ve found empirical evidence that such an approach can work. In fact, this may be the most commonly implemented solution to the general problem of getting stuff done, the well-known STUFF problem.