All projects: Gel, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Bit Literacy
A tip on embracing procrastination
Good essay on procrastination in the current New Yorker, finishing with a helpful tip:
Procrastination is driven, in part, by the gap between effort (which is required now) and reward (which you reap only in the future, if ever). So narrowing that gap, by whatever means necessary, helps. Since open-ended tasks with distant deadlines are much easier to postpone than focussed, short-term projects, dividing projects into smaller, more defined sections helps.
One easy way to manage bite-sized tasks is to use a todo list.
But what if there was a way to use a todo list and procrastinate, and still be effective?
That's exactly the idea behind a todo list that distinguishes between today's todos and tomorrow's todos. When each date on the calendar has its own todo list, you actually get more effective when you procrastinate. Any todo that you don't have to do today, you just redate to a future date - which then allows you to focus on the fewer todos that remain on today's list.
There are many todo lists available today, but I'm biased in favor of Good Todo, my own todo list that offers this exact feature.
Since the cost of doing something wrong can be 10x+ the cost of doing something right, a little slower, I believe that, in some cases, procrastination complements productivity.
A quick story from my teenage years. My brother and I were hiking around Point Sal for a few days. We hit a road after hiking over rough terrain and followed it for about a half hour. We were ravenous and exhausted, but had to keep going. We needed to get back home. We could have kept going (or just looked from atop a nearby hill) to find a fantastic local steakhouse and used their payphone to call friends to pick us up. Instead, we traversed cowfieilds on steep, windy hills. We ended up walking for several more hours than we needed, offcourse. We still found our way (and have great memories of the event), but it we quite literally took the hard road when we didn’t need to.
Procrastination Complements Productivity
Imagine you hit a fork in the road while walking, and your destination is 5 miles in one direction. You just don’t know which direction to take. You could take a left or right. You make the wrong choice and end up walking 15 miles instead of 5. Don’t just go when you hit that crossroads. Look around in the grass, you may just find a sign. Look around in the sky, you may find a signal. Wait. You’ll save time.
// These comments are mine, and not that of my employer, Impact Learning Systems, a leader in customer service training and consulting. //