It turns out that O'Hara was a bit of a trailblazer in the "I'll-do-it-tomorrow" category. In a landmark study of procrastination completed just a few years ago the news was not good. Our collective habit of putting things off is getting worse. While in the 1970s, only about 5 percent of Americans admitted to regularly procrastinating, today it's a whopping 26 percent. Few of us are strangers to the malingering to-do list item - typically a difficult or complex activity - that we just can't seem to get motivated for today. "I'll take care of that tomorrow," we say, O'Hara-style. Yet when tomorrow comes around, we often come to the same conclusion again, and again.As James Surowiecki explains in an excellent New Yorker article on procrastination: "Our memory for the intensity of visceral rewards is deficient: when we put off preparing for that meeting by telling ourselves that we’ll do it tomorrow, we fail to take into account that tomorrow the temptation to put off work will be just as strong." When tomorrow becomes today, our perspective changes. The question, then, is: How can we recalibrate - or just plain trick - our psyches and our selves into mustering up the right mixture of self-discipline and external motivators to take action sooner rather than later? Here are a few suggestions for overcoming procrastination:

1. View deadlines as a way to create a window of opportunity.

The default take on deadlines is typically to consider them to be cumbersome and stressful. Yet, from another perspective, a deadline can be viewed as a huge benefit to any project. Without the urgency of a hard deadline pushing a project to completion, it’s easy for you, your team, or your client to lose focus. We’ve all worked on agonizing projects where the timeline just bleeds on and on, merely because the flexibility is there. As illustrator Christoph Niemann pointed out in a 99U interview, deadlines can actually help us by creating a fixed window of opportunity that requires us to be focused, pragmatic, and decisive: The problem is when people have too much time on their hands. Because then at some point everybody’s going to question, “Why did you make it red, not green?” and “Could we try it upside-down, or left to right?” and then at some point it becomes arbitrary. If the anxiety is about the deadline, then the energy really focuses on the result. If there is not anxiety about a deadline, all of the anxiety goes right to the creative part.

2. Create accountability (and fear!).

In the documentary Conan O'Brien Can't Stop, we see the late night talk show host struggling with idleness and unemployment after he's booted from NBC. To get his groove back, O'Brien decides to put together a tour across America. When tickets go on sale, the team is stressed: No one knows what will happen. When it sells out in a matter of hours, they're thrilled. But after the flush of success wears off, O’Brien has his “Oh, shit!” realization: Now he has to actually figure out what he’s going to do. While most of us may not have the adoring audience that Conan O'Brien does, but we can all muster up someone to hold us accountable: Whether it's declaring your intentions publicly to your team of colleagues, taking on a paid assignment you have to deliver, or just telling a family member or friend who's willing to nag you. No one wants to disappoint an expectant audience. By creating one, you light a fire under your ass.

3. Break the project down into smaller concrete tasks.

It turns out that the manner in which a task is presented to someone - or the way in which you present it to your brain - has a significant impact on how motivated you will be to take action. A study led by researcher Sean McCrea at the University of Konstanz in Germany recently found that people are much more likely to tackle a concrete task than an abstract task. Here's a recap from The Economist:   It seems to me like the difference between being handed a map versus following the step-by-step instructions of a GPS device. Not everyone can read a map, but everyone can follow the directions. By breaking your project down into smaller, well-described tasks, the way forward becomes clear and it's easy to take action.

4. Work on the project a little bit each day.

A few weeks ago on Father’s Day, Fred Wilson did a nice post about why working on a problem over time is superior to churning something out just before a deadline. Here’s the advice his father shared with Fred when he got caught procrastinating: Most of our greatest insights - those fabled "A-ha!" moments - arrive when we least expect them. To use computer terms, they come when our brains are processing problems "in the background" of our consciousness - while we’re running, or showering, or sleeping. If we start projects at the 11th hour and cram, cram, cram till deadline, there's no allowance for the vital "downtime" that fuels our best creative insights.