We don't procrastinate for complex reasons; everything boils down to a thought that you're avoiding.

Sometimes -- rarely -- the thought you're avoiding is about the task itself. But when it's chronic, the thought is nearly always something about you, and what it "means" about you if you don't do it.

I actually wrote part of another article about procrastination, before this one, following a theory much closer to yours. I ended up determining that it wasn't going anywhere, but I think what I do have clarifies your theory immensely. So at the risk of putting words into your mouth, here it is:

In the 1950s, B.F. Skinner conducted a series of experiments which established the principle of Operant Conditioning. The canonical example of this sort of experiment is a rat in a box, which receives either a reward (food pellet) or a punishment (electric shock) when it presses a button. There is a lot of research on the effect of varying the conditions - species, target behavior, feedback type and schedule, etc - but in general, behaviors that produce rewards are promoted, and behaviors that produce punishment are inhibited.

Now, suppose an experimenter hooked you up to a mind-reading machine for a week, and every time you thought about elephants, he came and gave you $20, up to some rate limit. You would quickly become obsessed with elephants, and years later you'd still be patronizing the zoo. Reinforcement, it would seem, works for thoughts much like it does for behaviors. Now consider the opposite experiment, where every time you think about elephants, you receive negative feedback. This experiment can't be done with electric shocks (at least, not ethically), but it has been done. The Game is a mind game which some people play, with one rule: if you think of The Game, you have lost, and must annouce it to those around you. Insofar as operant conditioning applies to humans, and thought is a behavior, and embarrassment is punishment, The Game should be very easy: it conditions players to stop thinking about it. In fact, the opposite is true: players of The Game end up in a spiral where they can't think of anything else.

Clearly, the theory of operant conditioning does not apply straightforwardly to thoughts, and we shouldn't expect it to. After all, if thinking about something causes a strong reaction, positive or negative, then it's probably important enough to think about more. However, we still need a mechanism for choosing topics to think about, which means that some things will reinforce a topic and others will inhibit it. Reward and punishment can't fill these roles.

Where I got stuck was on trying to figure out just what does condition us to think more or less on a topic, and I don't think that can be answered accurately without much better instruments and experiments than are currently possible. Clearly, when people enter procrastination spirals there is some sort of conditioning going on, but negative affect alone can't be the cause; The Game seems like a strong refutation to that.