Productive Procrastination 

 The art of fooling yourself

On a particularly aimless day, I can find myself accomplishing many tasks but never completing anything important. Let’s say I have a blog to write, but can’t seem to find the “best” time or state of mind to action this task. Sometimes I’ll “rev” myself up by doing other smaller tasks as a means to generate some sort of forwards momentum that I hope will translate into the bigger task. Unfortunately, especially on aimless days, I will do what is called productive procrastination. All of a sudden, the pile of dishes I didn’t want to touch, the laundry that was never folded and put away, that lightbulb that needed changing for the last year, suddenly becomes way more important and easy to do in comparison to writing a blog. (This could apply to you as well if you have a big project coming up that you just can’t seem to start.) I might feel productive all of a sudden, but these tasks were never urgent in the first place. So why are they being done now? 

Productive procrastination occurs quite predominantly with people who have ADHD, but can affect many neurotypical people as well. This is a self-defence mechanism employed when people subconsciously know they might “waste” the entire day not doing the one task they have to do, but already carry loads of guilt from not having accomplished many things. Therefore, while they can’t help but procrastinate, they alleviate the pain of wasting an entire day, by being as productive as possible on things that are not urgent and possibly also not important. How do I know this? Because I do this all the time…

But I’ve had to employ a few tricks over the last few months in order to help with this all-too-common problem. In order to do this, I’ve also had to come to terms with the behaviour by exploring what elements lead to it. Here are two things to consider when being mindful of the behaviour and following that, two tricks to help manage it. 

Now, when you look back, you’ll see four square each with their own status. Considering that both the “Urgent” and “Not Urgent” squares in the “Not important” categories will tend to contain tasks akin to “read new book” or “buy those movie tickets,” you might dip into those later in the day, but for now we’ll focus on the “Important” column.

In the square “Urgent & Important”, if you were me, you’d write: finish this blog. This is a self evident square; everything in here is time sensitive and needs to be done. In “Not Urgent & Important”, you’ll find the laundry and dishes. It’s clearly important to put away clean clothes and wash dangerous bacteria ridden dishes, but this can always wait to be done last in the day when other things take precedence. 

So what’s the point of this little exercise? I’m pretty sure after making this diagram, that you can already think of tasks that can placed in each of those squares. This is supposed to help guide you visually to see what tasks must be placed first, and which one’s can wait. When you are having a bout of productive procrastination, you most often are going to be accomplishing those important but non-urgent tasks that are taking your attention away. It’s important to recognize what those tasks are in the first place, and know how to avoid it when the time is inappropriate.

Consideration #2: Mindless tasks don’t translate into mindful tasks

Say you are at work and you need to finish a report by the end of the day, you could decide to work on it right away, or you could check your emails again… 

Hours go by and you spent most of that time going back to your emails for a little bit, deleting junk mail, and returning to that barely started report, only to glaze your eyes over the empty page, returning to your emails to respond that one new notification. Emails are typically a mindless task. You can trudge through most of them in one sitting without ever really engaging with the material. You read one sentence, press delete, and forget the email existed. The problem is that the report is a mindful task that require lots of engagement. You have to be present. You can’t auto-pilot through the report. 

So while you might think you are being productive, you are really just lying to yourself by doing an easy mindless task instead of doing the one mindful and important one. This example isn’t anything new, but the same mentality can be applied to the example from before. Dishes are mindless, I can be on auto-pilot when I do those. But I can’t be on auto-pilot to write this blog. While I might look back on my day and say that I didn’t “entirely” waste my day because I folded the laundry and changed the lightbulb, had I prioritized writing the blog instead, you would be reading it now. (Spoilers… if you are, then I have yet to change the light bulb!)

Sure I can lie to myself and say that I’m “revving” myself up to be able to accomplish the task, but I’d be completely misdiagnosing the issue. Since mindless tasks are in fact mindless, you can’t expect to start engaging with a mindful task soon after. It operates under two different systems of motivation, which is why you can find yourself trapped in a bout of productive procrastination. You are trying to kick start the part of your brain needed for a difficult task by keeping it asleep. 

So how do you combat this?

Trick #1: Allow yourself 1 round of mindful productive procrastination

Considering everything I just mentioned, you might be a little shocked about this one. But the idea is simple. By allowing yourself 1 round of productive procrastination, you can in effect kick start the one thing you do need: momentum. You can still propel yourself towards a productive day by checking something off your to-do list, but this needs to be done, and the key word here is: “Mindfully”. 

So what does that look like? 

First, by recognizing that the task you are about to take is a “mindless” task, you then have to use the time spent doing that task actively thinking about the task that requires engagement. This mindless task can’t be something that requires you to read in any capacity, like emails, since that will occupy the same “Brain CPU” space that the engagement would try and share. This needs to be something like, finally assembling all those letters for the funds drive next month, or making the photocopies for that presentation tomorrow. Something that frees up the part of your brain that allows you to focus on a mindful task. 

Allowing yourself that one task needs to come in service of the second aspect, the active engagement in the task you are avoiding. You need to recognize that the mindless task you are performing is in service to allow you to actively engage with the difficult task. Admitting this to yourself will decrease the chance that you’ll bounce from one non-urgent task to another as a means to find the motivation to attend to the urgent task. 

I use this trick often when I’m about to start a new writing project. If I’m lacking the little bit of motivation, I’ll go either wash the dishes or fold the laundry and take that time to map out in my mind what I want to write. 

Of course, this trick requires that at the start of every mindful and engagement heavy task, there is a mindless task readily available for you, but unfortunately this isn’t always the case. What trick can you consistently depend on for long-term benefits?

You may know this already from one of my last blogs, (see “Out of sight - out of mind), but I enjoy the use of checklists. And for this trick, it’s no different. I like to use a sort of mental checklist, developed over time, that guarantees I’ll be productive. 

It’s how you start your “workday,” however that day looks like. In order not to become frustrated for constantly having to find the motivation, you want to create a step by step “countdown” that allows you to fulfill all those ritual needs and propels you to start. If you drink coffee or tea, this should be incorporated in the most structured way. You want to write in order all the steps you take in order to “get” in the zone. By recognizing that structure, you can finally sense exactly when you are meant to start working. 

I use this technique in the mornings as I work primarily from home. Taking a proper shower, eating my two breakfasts, doing my hair and wearing proper “work” clothes is a surefire way to promote a sense of momentum. I also listen to some instrumental drone music as soon as I sit down to work, as a lot of the time it sets my mind in a trance. (Any instrumental music can work, classical, jazz, experimental, EDM, as long as it doesn’t pull focus. You can scour sites like bandcamp.com where you’ll find tons of new and old music of literally every genre imaginable. Preferably scour this site after all important tasks are done, or you might fall into the rabbit hole that is this site.) 

Once I have my music ready, and everything is set, working becomes extremely easy for me. A break in any of these habits makes starting next to impossible. 

Unfortunately, even the best laid plans can fail, and you end up at 3 o’clock, still in sweatpants, with no motivation. Don’t sweat it. You can do a simple countdown with the aims of “starting” your day. The day isn’t over yet, you can still accomplish many things! 

Follow Just Say Hey! for events and articles