Is there experimental support for John Perry's "Theory of Structured Procrastination"? John Perry's theory of structured procrastination can be summed up as follows:

Some people are inherently predisposed to be procrastinators across a wide range of domains
Such procrastinators are still capable of being productive
They can achieve this because they work on less-important (but still important) tasks in order to avoid working on (procrastinate) on more-important (or seemingly more important) tasks.
If you are a procrastinator and want to still get things done, expand your workload/to-do list.

The first point seems to be well supported since procrastination is regarded in the literature as a personality trait (Steel, 2007). The second point also seems reasonable, although I am not sure of empirical support for it (although I can think of plenty of anecdotal evidence). The real interest for me, is the mechanism proposed in the 3rd and 4th point. (Note that Perry is not the only one to propose such a theory, see for instance Aaron Swartz' HOWTO: Be more productive.)
Has it been observed that procrastinators who are successful achieve this success by expanding their workload and working on medium importance task at the cost of high importance tasks they want to procrastinate on?
References
Steel, P. (2007) &quot;The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure.&quot; Psychological Bulletin 133(1): 65–94. [pdf]
In short, no. Perry's essay is amusing and compelling, but incomplete. Procrastination is an epiphenomenon of motivation, an active area of research which has some models relevant to the study of procrastination, such as:


Hyperbolic Discounting
Temporal Motivation Theory
Rational Choice Theory
Expectancy Theory


Perry emphasizes task importance as the metric that keeps a task unfinished and at the top of a structure procrastinator's to-do list. The truth is more complicated and not an entirely resolved area of research. Delayed gratification, immediate discomfort, and the procrastinator's prediction of probability of reward are some of the additional factors that determine which task a structured procrastinator will work on at a given time.

Over time, the least-desirable tasks often remain unfinished, seem increasingly important, and thus move to the top of the to-do list.

References


  
  Laibson, D. (1997). Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting. Quarterly Journal of Economics 112(2): 443–477.
  Steel, P., König, C. (2006) Integrating theories of motivation. Academy of Mgmt. Rev. 31(4): 889-913.