There are two kinds of things that you need to do in life; the things you do to survive, and those you do to achive your goals or dreams. Reaching where you wants to in life, is not only about money or fame or career, it is obviously also about relationships and friends; these are implied, but they do exist as an integral part of any dream. It is not about survival any more; the world is way out the league of people who strive only to survive. I think people instinctively adapt, evolve and survive, you don’t really need to put in a lot of effort to do that. Surviving thus, becomes a smaller thing to be done, compared to achieving your dreams.
Procrastinating well means focussing uninterruptedly on the bigger picture, postponing the smaller things until its high time that they need to be done. So I think, simply working in order to fill your stomach is not going to get you anywhere in life. Work to fulfil your dreams; you would always survive one way or another. A good procrastinator would put off the small things that do not require his immediate attention.
Check out what paulgraham has to say about this …
Now, when it comes to making decisions, you can mostly choose to procrastinate it if you arent entirely convinced about it. Its not about making quick decisions, its about making good decisions quickly. Even if you have all the information necessary to make the decision, procrastinate it if you don’t feel too good about it. Give yourself time to listen to your instincts.
In software, we always think about higher level abstractions while thinking about a problem or a design. In other words, it is very important to be able to procrastinate thinking about how you would implement it, as doing so may endanger a radical solution.
Also, if you think a particular problem isnt worth accounting for at that point of time, procrastinate it. It is very likely someone someday would find a far simpler solution to it. One of the best examples of this is the Y2K problem. Those COBOL engineers successfully procrastinated accounting for the first two digits of the date in order to save much needed space. Later, engineers successfully overcame this problem as they now had the tools and resources to do it.
