I'm Not Procrastinating

I'm avoiding risk by delaying a decision until the last responsible moment:

Making decisions at the Last Responsible Moment isn't procrastination; it's inspired laziness. It's a sold, fundamental risk avoidance strategy. Decisions made too early in a project are hugely risky. Early decisions often result in work that has to be thrown away. Even worse, those early decisions can have crippling and unavoidable consequences for the entire future of the project.

Early in a project, you should make as few binding decisions as you can get away with. This doesn't mean you stop working, of course-- you adapt to the highly variable nature of software development. Often, having the guts to say "I don't know" is your best decision. Immediately followed by "..but we're working on it."

And this isn't a joke.  It's actually very true.  And although I can't claim to practice this strategy because I thought about it thoroughly, and decided that it was always responsible to do things at the last possible minute... I'm sure deep down that's the motivation for my procrastination.  I just haven't taken the time to analyze my reasoning yet... I'll do that tomorrow.

I do this all the time with technology I buy.  People are often times surprised that I don't have more really cool and up to date tech goodies than I really do.  And at one point in time in my life, I used to buy lots of this stuff.  But then I realized I wasn't using half the stuff to its full potential... and when I finally needed to use it, there was a new thing out there that did the job 10 times better.  But now I've got this thing that I bought a year ago when it was more expensive, and I'm pissed.  So now I wait to buy stuff until I actually have a real good use for it... and often times I wait a little longer.

I tend to do this with the code I write as well.  I prioritize the bugs I'm fixing and the features I'm implementing by the amount of information I know about it... not how long it will take to do the work.  It kills my boss when I do it that way, because it sometimes means I'm doing the larger stuff last, when most project managers like big features done first... but I also have to redo a lot less work than everyone else because of this strategy.