The nuts and bolts of procrastination

Today we come to the fun part of writing your how-to article: writing 1000 words for it. 1000 is just a round figure, of course; it could be 10,000.

After yesterday's insightful lesson, you should have several points you could make about how to procrastinate. If you haven't thought of any, well, you can always do this part tomorrow.

Depending on your subject, you might need to use a "do this step first, then this step" format ("First put the cat in the dryer, then turn the dryer on"). For a subject like procrastination, however, you might choose instead to give random instructions about how to excel at it. Here are some tips you might want to give your readers (in the preferred bullet format):

• Since big jobs can seem overwhelming when looked at as a whole, be sure to do this. Tell yourself, "I have to gut, rewire, rebuild, and furnish this entire dilapidated old house in period style today." This will so overwhelm you that even if you are the most hardy and experienced of renovators, you will put off the work until the house slowly starts to fall in on itself, termites reduce it to rubble, and birds make off with the rest, removing the need for you to do anything about the house.
  
• Look for large blocks of open, uninterrupted time in which to complete your projects, such as a decade. This will ensure that you never even get started on your endeavors, let alone finish them.
  
• This step is similar to the one above: Fool yourself into believing that you can do more than is humanly possible. If you are inexperienced enough in procrastinating to break down your project into several smaller steps, rather than planning to complete it in one fell swoop as recommended above, be unrealistic about the amount of time each step will take you. For instance, you might plan to write a truly moving poem the size of the U.S. Constitution while you drive to the drugstore. You may get started on it, but you will never get to step 2, which, remember, is part of your goal: procrastinating.
• Busy yourself with lots of trivial tasks. For instance, if your goal is to clean the closet, become distracted by finding several pairs of shoes you had forgotten about, and proceed to try them all on with various outfits. Then notice all those old records you used to love, and go to some antique stores in search of a turntable so you can play them again. (Then again, music may motivate you to clean, so maybe you should distract yourself with something else. Always keep your ultimate goal in mind: putting off a task as long as possible.) The more important the project you're working on, the more interruptions you should have.
  
• If your project has a deadline, leave yourself basically no time to get it done before then. True procrastinators view deadlines as the time to start their projects. If this seems too drastic a step for you at first, practice waiting until the night before your big presentation to start researching how to save your company, then on subsequent projects (assuming you still have a job), gradually work your way up to waiting until the deadline to start. Kids do it all the time, and look how much fun they have!
• Be a perfectionist. Perfectionists make great procrastinators! If you wait until the perfect time to start something, or you have the perfect idea for a craft, or when you can do something more perfect than anyone else on the planet -- including Martha Stewart -- you will be dead, without having accomplished anything. For a procrastinator, this is the ultimate reward.

There are many other tips you could give readers on how to procrastinate, such as to constantly berate themselves as they put off a given task so as to kill any motivation they might have to start it. But you want to avoid overwhelming readers with the amount of information you give them. Remember that you are acting as a teacher in this endeavor, which means that you must assign term papers. But here's the good news! You can put off reading them.