You can also call this “productive procrastination,” the term used by Piers Steel, a psychologist at the University of Calgary. It’s his personal favorite of the dozens of techniques he cataloged while researching his 2011 book, “The Procrastination Equation.”

“For most of us, procrastination can be beaten down, but not entirely beaten,” Dr. Steel told me, describing how one of his scholarly papers on procrastination took him a decade to write. “My best trick is to play my projects off against each other, procrastinating on one by working on another.”

Dr. Steel says it’s based on sound principles of behavioral psychology: “We are willing to pursue any vile task as long as it allows us to avoid something worse.” He gives theoretical credit to Sir Francis Bacon, the 17th-century philosopher, whose self-control strategy was to “set affection against affection, and to master one by another; even as we use to hunt beast with beast.”

Dr. Steel, who has surveyed more than 24,000 people around the world, says that 95 percent of people confess to at least occasional procrastination. (You can gauge yourself by taking his survey at Procrastinus.com.) About 25 percent of those surveyed are chronic procrastinators, five times the rate in the 1970s.

He attributes the increase to the changing nature of the workplace: the more flexible that jobs become, the more opportunities to avoid unpleasant tasks. Workers now typically spend a quarter of the day procrastinating, students a third of the day. Men are more likely than women to be chronic procrastinators, especially young men.

How many of them are actually being productive about it? Alas, there’s no good data, and for now many self-control researchers have doubts about positive procrastination. Even when it works, they say, you’re still wasting energy as you fret, consciously or unconsciously, about the task you’re avoiding.

And while Robert Benchley may have built that bookshelf, Raymond Chandler strikes many experts as a better role model. Chandler used the same insight of Dr. Perry — that procrastinators rarely sit around absolutely idle — to develop a strategy that Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State (and my co-author of a book on willpower) calls the Nothing Alternative. Chandler forced himself to write detective stories by setting aside four hours a day and following two rules:

a) You don’t have to write.

b) You can’t do anything else.

“It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school,” Chandler explained. “If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored.”