How to ... procrastinate

Inertia sounds like the name of a newly privatised energy company. If it was, you wouldn't want to get your energy from them. In real life, inertia is what stops things happening and it's the driving force behind procrastination.

Procrastination is vertical gravity. It is a powerful force that prevents us getting on with things. This force is particularly evident in beds, armchairs and offices, where it can keep things not happening for hours if not days. Entry-level procrastination is when you put off something today that you could quite easily do tomorrow. Advanced procrastination is when you put off the putting-off until tomorrow.

For every reason to do something, there are six reasons not to do it. Trying to think of a seventh is the seventh. In the workplace, more than half the cups of tea and coffee consumed in the average day are made to avoid doing something more important. With meetings, roughly half are to avoid actual work. In fact, a good few jobs are there to avoid life itself being lived.

Truly lazy people don't count as procrastinators. They don't decide to put things off because they never really countenance putting them on in the first place. The terminally idle avoid procrastination because it often involves a lot of displacement activity. Certain hardcore procrastinators will expend more energy on their various displacement activities than on the initial job involved.

In business, they have a great excuse for procrastination called "just in time management" where things are done at the last moment to save cost. In real life, this is called "close shave management", in which things are done at the last moment to save total catastrophe. This approach is surprisingly popular because many people need a scary deadline to kickstart themselves. Doing things in a last-minute panic is fine if you've enjoyed the time you've wasted beforehand, but with procrastination, you normally don't because it feels like a slow-rising panic.

Procrastination can be thought of as a health-and-safety measure. After all, it's only fools who rush in. You may look as though you're slumped in an armchair like a sack of potatoes, but, in fact, you're carrying out a risk assessment of your forthcoming burst of activity.