John Perry writes about Structured Procrastination as a way to get important stuff done by avoiding more important things. Excepted from his original essay:
The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.
My gathering-style productivity is in the same spirit. I'd love to make this into a structured tool, something that captures what you did into an accrual log somehow automatically. I think my knowledge management system needs to include this.