Really, I don't mean to pick on Ben Franklin, but what choice do I have? It was the aphorist from Philly who came up with this piece of phenomenally bad advice: "Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today."

It's catchy, sure. It's also dead wrong. And dead backwards. It should be: "Don't do today what you can put off until tomorrow." Or, better, the day after tomorrow. Or, better yet, the week after the day after tomorrow, or, best of all, never.

Think about it: If you wait long enough, projects that you put off today could be assigned to someone else tomorrow. Or the project could disappear. Or you could disappear. (Ask a Twitter employee. It can happen.)

Despite these common-sense truths, procrastination has gotten a bad rap. Case in point: a recent Brain Matters column in The Washington Post by Richard Sima. The title says it all: "What Causes Your Brain to Procrastinate and How to Face It."

As you might suspect, Sima's answer to this question is not "with your head held high." Instead, he treats procrastination as a cognitive malady that, well, needs treatment.

"We believe that doing tasks will somehow be easier in the future," Sima writes. Procrastinators cling to this misbelief, even though, as Arizona State cognitive neurologist Samuel McClure puts it, "You know it's going to stink in the future just as much as it's going to stink doing it now, but internally you just can't help yourself."

(How Professor McClure knows about your stink-o assignments is a mystery to me. I certainly didn't tell him.)

I will spare you the neurological mumbo-jumbo about a possible source for procrastination. Spoiler alert — it's the "dorsal medial prefrontal cortex." This is the part of your brain that "weighs rewards and effort," and was unquestionably closed for repair when you decided to accept a job offer from your present employer.

Plus, being humans, instead of being lab rats, scientific studies of our behavior show that we "tend to be more impulsive and prefer small rewards sooner over a larger reward later." That's why we put off the long-term benefits of dieting for the short-term benefits of gobbling a pint of "Chubby Hubby" right now. A lab rat would never make that choice. As everyone knows, lab rats prefer "Coffee, Coffee, BuzzBuzzBuzz."

If I haven't yet convinced you of the benefits of procrastination, you're ready to learn "How to Face Procrastination." Reporter Sima has two strategies.

No. 1: Remember the task.

Procrastination requires repeated decisions. "If you forget that at some point that you have this decision to make, then obviously you will never perform the task," says French neurologist Raphael Le Bouc, who points out that "setting reminders for the task and prompting that decision more frequently may reduce your probability to procrastinate."

This is where sticky notes come into play. The more time you spend writing reminders and sticking them all over your workspace, the less time you'll have to work on your project. Stick enough sticky notes on your computer screen and you won't know you have any work to do at all. Caution: a screen covered in stickies does make it difficult to do your most important and never-tabled tasks: shopping for bed wedges on Contour Living and stopping Dr. Robotnik in "Sonic Adventure 4."

No. 2: Envision your future self.

Instead of luxuriating in the joy of doing nothing and getting paid for it, make yourself totally miserable with a taste of "episodic future thinking."

This technique allows you to "address the cognitive bias for believing a task will be easier in the future head-on" by "envisioning your future self — the one who will be saddled with unpaid bills, looming deadlines and unwashed dishes."

Surely, your future self will not enjoy the financial pressure, the professional jeopardy and the rank aroma of ancient meatloaf rotting away in your sink. On the other hand, your future self will not have turned in a finished project only to have their manager scream at them for incompetence, or faced the derision of their co-workers for putting the existence of the company at risk.

In fact, your future can-do self will definitely admire your present procrastinating self, lazy, laid-back and not really caring what anyone thinks about your indolent ways. It's a salubrious state of mind that your future self will have to put in a lot of hard work to achieve.

But not today. It can wait until tomorrow.

Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@bgplanning.com. To find out more about Bob Goldman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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