This summer, the world's leading experts on not getting things done gathered in Lima for the 2007 International Conference on Procrastination. No, I have no idea how long they'd been meaning to get around to it, and there will be no such smart-aleck commentary in this column: can you imagine how many incredibly lame jokes procrastination researchers have to endure on a daily basis? Peru was an apt choice: in March, its government launched an initiative to combat the nation's chronic punctuality problem. (And, yes indeed, the invitation to the anti-lateness campaign's opening ceremony arrived at media organisations after it had finished.) But for all the scholarly research on "task avoidance", and literally hundreds of self-help books, procrastination is still commonly misunderstood. Which means that if you suffer from it - and some people really do suffer - your attempts to cure it might be making it worse.

Real procrastination, which afflicts an estimated 20% of us, isn't the same as laziness, being disorganised, or putting off boring chores. It's an active avoidance strategy, and because it's usually rooted in the fear of failure, or success, or loss of control, it most affects exactly those things that really matter to us, not the chores. Personally, I've spent many hours procrastinating by reading books and websites on combating procrastination - with the handy side-effect that I can summarise here what I reckon are the only three genuinely useful pieces of advice they contain:

1 Motivation follows action
Books on "getting motivated " - and hyperenergetic "motivational speakers" - ironically compound the problem by reinforcing the idea that you need to feel positive about doing something before you begin it. But that's a subtle form of pressure. What if you dropped the requirement of feeling good, accepted that you felt bad and just started anyway? Motivation usually shows up quickly thereafter. (See the work of psychologist Shoma Morita at todoinstitute.org.)

2 Resistance is a signpost
Resisting a task is usually a sign that it's meaningful - which is why it's awakening your fears and stimulating procrastination. You could adopt "Do whatever you're resisting the most" as a philosophy of life. As Steven Pressfield says in his pompous but interesting book The War Of Art , "The more important [something] is to our soul's evolution, the more resistance we will feel toward pursuing it."

3 Schedule leisure, not work
Procrastination is an act of rebellion against what you believe you "should" be doing, and mentally shouting at yourself to do it will only make you rebel more stubbornly. In his just-reissued book The Now Habit, Neil Fiore suggests keeping an "Unschedule " - a time log on which you make plans for leisure activities but on which you record hours of work only after you've finished them. If you plan in advance to do x hours of work in a day, anything less becomes a failure; if you make no such plans, every minute worked counts as a success.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com