Putting off an unimportant task to work on an important one isn't procrastinating. It's prioritizing.<p>The best bit of this essay is the last 5 paragraphs, how to work on big things:<p>1. Break it down into fun small goals and experiments that get you in the right direction but offer their own reward.<p>2. Let desire and interest pull you to certain activities at certain times. You're not a computer working through a todo list. Let serendipity happen.<p>I find having a to do list pushes me to do nothing. The thought of working through it is just too depressing. Letting desire and interest lead me means I'm usually doing SOMETHING. Often quite useful things it turns out.<p>When I look back over the first 15 years of my career I did my best work when I had no to do list at all.
"The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination [...] the to-do list is itself a form of type-B procrastination"<p>This resonates so much with me. It took a long time to realise that my specific procrastination problem was type-B (and type-A). It then took another year or so before I realised that, contrary to a lot of advice out there, to-do lists are a terrible idea for a remedy.
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development</a> helped me to overcome procrastination