Memory-efficient dynamic deferral of scheduled tasks

Dynamic deferral systems and methods providing a means to defer performance of a task for a distributed computing system entity both by the number of work cycles as well as in response to an occurrence of a triggering event. By deferring the scheduling in terms of the number of work-cycles, the memory footprint is reduced as the scheduling matrix uses only one byte to store the number. This approach also takes advantage of the most significant bit of a byte to indicate whether the scheduled job is to be evoked in response to a triggering event.