Every thought I've thought on productive procrastination
Productive procrastination is the art of delaying the task you need to get done by doing other (often less important) tasks that need to be done. Now, I’ve heard many different takes on this habit, and have taken different stances through the years. Today, I will break down some of the benefits and problems. I will also discuss some alternative methods.
When doing work, you should aim to stay in motion. Once I’ve been going for a while, I often find myself entering a flow state wherein I lose any sense of time. THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE WHEN DOING PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING. When you stop doing productive work, by checking your socials or watching funny memes for example, this state is lost as well. In contrast, procrastinating on other productive tasks still lets mee keep some of the momentum I’ve built up, making it easier to start on my main TODO.
Keeping a backlog of tasks to procrastinate on helps me clear those pesky tasks that I always seem to forget. These tasks, like cleaning my laptop, organizing my notes or updating my calendar are often perfect for short procrastinations. Without the backlog, these tasks wouldn’t be on my radar as often.
This one is quite obvious. When you can’t summon the willpower to actually do the work you need, getting SOME work done is always better than nothing.
When mixing tasks throughout the day, you can stay motivated more by mixing up your work. An added benefit is that this increases creativity. I have found that a fresh pair of eyes often helps making things clearer, and results in me thinking more creative thoughts. Interweaving work can also make it easier to create mental links.
Of course, taking a break is important, and this method can easily lead to a mindset of perpetual working. This is why you should always differentiate the time when you should work but don’t want to, and the time that you actually want to relax. The main take-away is that normal procrastination often has you “semi-relaxing” when you want to be working, and this should be avoided.
Of course, you can procrastinate productively all you want, but at the end of the day, you’re still delaying your actual tasks. If this is kept up, you’re still in trouble. I find that is can be just as easy to procrastinate this way, and though this makes it easy to implement, it also makes it hard to eat that frog.
Tying into the last point, a final pitfall of productive procrastination is how it gives you a feeling of doing good work, when in reality you are still somewhat wasting your time.
In the most basic case, you would just keep track of whatever you need to get done besides your main project. Then, every time you would get the urge to procrastinate, you can work in these tasks instead. The classic strategy for me would be to have a todo-list filled with both smaller and larger tasks, to then pick up smaller tasks when I feel the need to procrastinate (I.e. I get bored with what I’m currently doing).
You should aim to make this a habit, and I may share some tips on how to build habits in the future. A tip is to make the productive tasks fun to do. For me, I really like meal-prepping and organizing things, so these tasks are perfect candidates.
A few months ago, I was thinking about the problem of putting your focus in the wrong place with this method. To fix this, I invented the ‘key quest’ method. This is my take on gamification of tasks. It works as follows:
The way I work, I really enjoy going off on little side activities throughout the week. To make sure I don’t overdo this, the key quest method helps me stay on track more. Besides, it helps me stay motivated by rewarding me with more variety of work when I complete tasks.
Another benefit is that it forces me to focus on only a few tasks at a time. I don’t want to think about what to do more than necessary, and having less options through key questing achieves this by making productive procrastination leaner.
Of course, this key quest method takes a little more effort, and that can make it easier to lose focus if you don’t plan anything in advance. An easier approach to make it so that you still achieve your goals is this rebound method. Basically, you work like you normally would, and let yourself do productive approximation when you feel like you need a change of work. The only difference is that when you are done with this procrastination task (which should not take all day off course), you rebound immediately to the most important task that needs to get done.
In my experience, this is what I do when I don’t feel like planning too much of my day. Because motivation is often gained after a little procrastination, I find it easier to get started on big tasks after doing a little task (momentum). This method uses the philosophy of never slipping twice: after doing something you shouldn’t, you should always do something you should.
In the end, I find productive procrastination to be a worthwhile method when done properly. If used consciously, it will boost your performance on small tasks. As long as you’re careful not to overdo it, I would suggest giving it a try. I always try to experiment with different ways to stay productive, and I absolutely urge you to do the same :)
Signing off, have a lovely day!