Why putting off what you can do tomorrow until tomorrow is not procrastination

Perhaps this is obvious, but it helps tremendously in my productivity.

There are a number of advantages to saving things that can be done later, until later:

1. You might decide later that you didn't even need to do it, and thus you saved time.
2. You are able to get the more important things done first.
3. You avoid any additional recursion (i.e., any unexpected task that the task might induce you to do, will be avoid).
4. By the time you end up doing it, you might know a more efficient way to do it, be more capable to do it, or be less likely to make a mistake in doing it because of what you've learned along the way, doing other, higher-priority things.

It's this last one that I've found an especially rich source of saved time---particularly in the the technical arena. Often small tidbits of knowledge make the difference between huge amounts of wasted time and quickly getting a task done. This has many causes.

So while it might sound like procrastination, saving tasks until later and instead focusing on more pressing ones, may enable a fortuitous discovery that makes the postponed task much easier.

Along these lines, I've been using Trello, to quickly note something I'd like to come back to later. This way I can postpone tasks regret-free. And in addition to getting higher priority things done first, who knows, I might be able to do the queued task faster or better, later.

Kevin