Top Five Ways to Procrastinate but Still Feel Good About It. By Scott Keenan

Procrastination does not have to make you feel like you’re a failure. As an Olympian of putting things off, I've found several ways to procrastinate that defy the actual definition of the word. The key to not feeling like you’re wasting time is to find something that creates the illusion of progress without actually helping you get whatever it is you’re trying to do, done.

1. Cleaning

This always needs to be done, no matter how much of it you’ve done recently. If you run out of space in your house, there’s always the car, the lawn, and small closed-in spaces you wouldn’t normally clean. No time to get any work I would get paid for done today. I need my house to be spotless!

2. Planning

This is genius. You make a list of all of the things you have to do. Then you prioritize them in the order you’re going to complete them. Depending on how many things you have…this could take forever. Especially if you think really hard about each one, and then make sub-lists of all the steps involved in each item of the original list. There’s no limit to the amount of planning that can be done before the actual execution of something. For example: Are you applying for jobs? First, identify all of the jobs you are going to apply for and make a list of them. Then list them in order of which ones you want the most. Then list them in chronological order from the one that closes first to last. Do you know how long that takes? ALL AFTERNOON!!...if you do it the way I do.

3. Baking

You know what would save sooo much time? Already having meals prepared and divided into portions. 

Step 1: push everything you needed to do today aside. You’ve got to spend all afternoon making something so you will have more time to do all those important things. 

Step 2: Pick something you’ve never made before. Make sure it’s some kind of 3 part jigsaw puzzle of a recipe where you have to make one thing, then make another thing, then put the first thing in the second thing  and fold it into the shape of a swan or equally complicated ornithological creature, and bake it….TWICE! To take up additional time, you could put all of the ingredients into small Pyrex bowls first, like they do on cooking shows. Then if a camera crew stops in, you are all ready for your cooking show, which is super productive because of all the money you’d make from it. 

Step 3: Tweet about how you spent all day cooking.

4. Saving Money

First thing every morning you should check your bank account online. Get really angry about some of the purchases that you didn’t authorize, stomp your foot….scratch your head….yeah you bought those….never mind. Then think about all the money that has to come out of your account this month and make sure there is enough to cover everything. Then look at how much you spent on stupid stuff like coffee and restaurants. You don’t have anything to show for all that money now. Think of ways to avoid doing that in the future, like taking your own coffee to places…or baking. Look at how much you spent on groceries. Did you feed a team of athletes last week? Start looking at flyers to find out what’s on sale this week. Make a list of all the things you need to buy and all the places you need to go to get them. Sound familiar? That’s right…you’re planning again. Spend some time thinking of the most effective way to go to all the places you need to go to get all of the things that will help you save money. There is no distance too far to travel to save 50 cents on a tube of toothpaste.

5. Increasing Your Klout Score

If you’re ever going to be taken seriously by the internet, you need a pretty decent Klout score. For those of you who don’t know, Klout.com is a site that tells you how cool you are on a scale of 1 to 100. Seriously though, it is supposed to tell you how much influence you have based on your social network followers and their engagement with your posts. You can tell it’s super legit because it gives you more points for visiting their site more frequently. Also, people can give you K+’s if you influence them. I’m sure there is a super complicated formula that measures how high your klout score should increase per K+. Once you get super popular and move to a bigger city, there are all kinds of “perks” for having a high klout score like free sandwiches and coffee. To increase your score you need to engage with other people with high klout scores. First you need to identify the people you know with high scores. Then you need to talk to them (Online though…if you call the on the phone it doesn’t count…unless you post that you talked to them on their Facebook wall and then they agree by commenting and/or liking your post). Also, engaging with people who have low scores really doesn’t do anything for you, so don’t waste your time “Liking” your mom’s post about supper….even if it's homemade spaghetti, which I haven't had in a while (just saying). Then you have to read the news and post interesting articles that will generate discussion or that other people will “Like” or share or retweet.  In turn, you should comment, “Like” and retweet other people’s posts, because they will remember that you helped them and may help you back. It’s pretty much a vicious circle of time-wasting that results in other people also wasting their time.

The most effective methods of procrastination involve doing all of these things in succession or some sort of circular pattern that brings you back to the original form of procrastination. Of course, eventually you need to get actual things done, but using these methods will make you feel less crappy about not doing them than spending the afternoon playing Angry Birds.