Way back when Netflix would mail you DVDs (I’m sure my children have no idea what a DVD is), there was a research study (Mixing Virtue and Vice: Combining the Immediacy Effect and the Diversication Heuristic) that illustrated procrastination well — people had to select movies to watch, and while they would choose a mix “highbrow” movies and less heavy movies, people would tend to select funny/lighter movies to watch. I remember hearing about this study back in my Netflix DVD days, and realizing that I had several “highbrow” movies low on my queue, which never made it up to the current list (I have yet to watch Schlinder’s List).

I see this behavior in lots of other areas, such as how software teams often have a backlog with lots of big, complex tasks way down the roadmap that never gets done, and the near-term stuff is small or constantly churning tasks based on what senior leaders are excited about recently.

I appreciate when I see people push against this tendency — I have a great mentor who once brought me a box of books to offer me, because he realized that while he hadn’t read them, they weren’t high enough on his priority list to ever read.

Recommendation: Look at your todo list or your team’s multi-year goals at work, and think about what should be removed as a “never going to be important enough” or moved up to actually get done (see also the classic time management concept of attacking your rocks (big, important work) before the sand (little, tactical things) fill up your time).