For somebody who harps on annoyingly about productivity as much as I do, I’m insanely good at procrastinating.
We all say this of course, followed by a laugh about how lazy we all are; but seriously, if I have one thing I need to do I will do everything else in the world, over a course of days, weeks even, in order to avoiding doing what I need to do.
I’m not sure why this is, so I won’t throw out profound reasoning for the sake of shovelling some sexy, articulate advice down your throat, but I do think it may have something to do with a fear of the thing you need to do due to it being fairly undefined (and therefore, a fear of the unknown).
While going through my most recent spell of looking at what I needed to do, followed by sixteen games of Bejeweled, four Instagram refreshes, and a quick check on the news, in between these distractions I noticed I was working on something that I didn’t need to work on at that moment, but it did need to get done.
It wasn’t the ‘one thing’ I needed to be getting on with, but it was something I needed to do. Though my ordering was dramatically off, at least while I was procrastinating I was still getting something worthwhile done, something that I would have needed to do after my ‘one thing’ anyway.
It reminded me of something I read recently (I can’t remember who by, lo siento amigo) where the author said whenever he falls deep into a procrastination bubble he lets himself run with it. He closes the program/tab on the work he had intended on doing and lets himself totally indulge in his habit of procrastination, actively telling himself he can’t work; he HAS to procrastinate.
It doesn’t take long for him to become tired of swiping down to refresh Twitter and jump at the chance to get back on with the work he had originally intended for himself.
This situation is not ideal, but where’s the fun in that? Avoiding procrastination altogether, though possible in certain situations, is rarely going to work out. Much better to work with it, procrastinating on doing the one thing you really need to do with something you need to do with less urgency; than doing nothing at all.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Ah! New design! I’m not sure what to think about it, Ben.
But this post definitely resonates with me right now. I’ve had to do a two-week project (failed considerably with four days left), yet I can’t say I’ve procrastinated positively. I’ve taken up a new project (which isn’t actually necessary at all) and I’ve played many games.
My limits of boredom aren’t as shallow as I’d like them to be.
We can’t win them all (this I’ve learnt from my lengthy games of Bejeweled, if nothing else).
I totally understand you. I try to think of myself as organized but I fall into procrastination way too often. It’s really weird sometimes I know I have to work on a prject but I prefer to watch non sense videos on youtube. This is really annoying. What I realized is that between 9am and 11am I feel that I have the whole day in front of me so I don’t pay attention and I start to do something totally unproductive. So now I try to have commitment in the morning. I set appointments because I know that this way I will have to do something. Generally I feel some kind of pressure during the afternoon because the day is ending and I want to finish stuff so I generally don’t procrastinate that much.
Overall, I’m glad to know I’m not alone… And I think that if we realize we are procrastinating and we try to find an answer it’s already a good thing. I have the feeling that most GTD/efficiency/productivity person is actually always worried of being lazy, don’t you?
I can totally relate, especially to the feeling of having the whole day ahead of me and slowly feeling it slip away (though if we weren’t doing work we enjoyed we would be happy that our day was ending, so I think we are still winning in the end – though that’s a topic for another day).
I don’t know if it’s a pattern, but I’ve found recently that when I’ve been more strategic about listing my daily tasks if I feel like I want to procrastinate I can look at those tasks and, like I said in the post, start working on one of those instead (even if “working on” simply means reading an article, or something that doesn’t require much concentration).