[sigilis]

Task selection is the tricky bit. It has to actually be important in some dimension. The easiest is something with an amount of social pressure. If someone is waiting for you to do something that you have promised, then it acquires a kind of urgency and importance even if it wouldn’t harm you not to do it in a timely manner.

It’s not fake importance, it’s just taking advantage of the fact that you want to be seen as dependable and effective to other people.

[jbstack]

> If someone is waiting for you to do something that you have promised, then it acquires a kind of urgency and importance even if it wouldn’t harm you not to do it in a timely manner.

I don't agree with this though. If someone is waiting for me to do something that I've promised, and I don't do it, I'm going to suffer the harm of stress, guilt, shame, etc. related to breaking my promise and people thinking I'm unreliable. I think this idea only works if we define "harm" in a very narrow sense to exclude the types of harms that come from the "important" task that we're going to deliberately avoid doing.

[sigilis]

You are correct. This strategy is not for making you happy with your procrastination. The main goal is to make you an effective human being. As a result, this excludes personal emotional effects from the definition of harm.

Furthermore, what an effective human is also something that you have to define for yourself.

Procrastination is considered a negative trait for a reason.