How to make your procrastination productive – Part 1

I have a serious problem: I like procrastination! I mean, folks, be honest to yourself: we all like to avoid work! In fact the one thing I was really really good at in my apprenticeship was to look busy when I was not. The aim of this practice was to convince my boss that I was busy, while I was not, so that she wouldn’t give me more work to do. I really didn’t like that job, so that attitude is something that I really wouldn’t have nowadays, because I wouldn’t do a job that I wouldn’t like. Now, procrastination is a little different though: it is there to convince yourself that you are busy, while you’re not, so that you won’t set yourself more stuff to do. It can tell you a lot about how much you actually like what you’re doing or maybe about how hard or easy the work you’re doing is for you. If you’re bored, you’ll avoid work, if you’re stuck you’ll avoid it as well, if you don’t like it … and so on. Stop for a moment and think about it: Why are you actually avoiding your work?

For the last uni-year it was quite easy to tell, why I tried avoiding to do the work: It was too easy. It’s just no good if you can do an assignment with 100% in just about an evening. Next time you’ll just think: “Oh no, not again, it’s just a code monkey’s job”. Sometimes I already knew that something would be a pain, because someone else already tried it. One of my maths assignments took 5 hours to plot. Of course I really didn’t want to do it once I knew that. Some things were really scary as well: I had to hold a presentation which was broadcasted per stream over the internet, it had to be 5 minutes, to the point and I’m generally quite afraid of speaking in front of people. I considered getting a doctor’s note, I considered leaving the country (”I don’t like it here anyway, why am I doing this to myself? Oh my gosh, I will fail, I will forget everything, my slides will be unreadable and I’ll make a complete ass of myself. I’m gonna leave. I could leave, right? …”), I considered failing it and in the end … I just did it. I was incredibly nervous and 30 seconds short, because I was speaking too fast and I didn’t fail. In fact I got a decent mark.

There might be still other things that would make you procrastinate: Repetitititive tasks (!): Monday morning ping statistics made me cringe in my old company. In the end I wrote a script, because it was just such a pain to do it over and over again. Other examples are laundry, cooking, cleaning, bringing the rubbish out – those things that Hannah Arendt calls “labor” in her description of the three kinds of our being-in-the-world: labor, work and action.

So far we have: 1. too easy, 2. too much effort involved with too little gain, 3. too scary, 4. too repetitive and of course there is also 5. too hard and 6. too boring. Of course all these reasons can be combined or causally related: too easy tasks are too boring and too hard ones are too scary, etc. There is a solution to every one of those problems though. Just to give a few examples:

• Make easy tasks harder through added details. If you could spend 20 minutes on knocking a template up in a graphics package you already know, but it would be incredibly boring for you, try to do it in a graphics package you don’t know. You will learn some skills on the way and it will be more interesting!
• Make hard tasks easier for yourself: most tasks are hard because you lack skills. Learn these skills first and these tasks will seem much easier to you. This usually involves doing it the hard way once: Every beginning is a hard one!
• Too much effort involved for little gain? You can either pay someone to do the monkey work or try to automatize it somehow. I know people who rather spend two days working on a script to automatically do something instead of spending one day with copy any paste. From the copy-and-paste-job you won’t learn anything. From writing a script you probably will. It is the old story of the secretary who doesn’t want to learn the automatic letter generator function of her favourite Word processor. Don’t be a monkey, free yourself!
• Confront your fears: If you don’t like calling people you don’t know, then use every opportunity to practice. If you have the option to either call or email, then of course call the person. This one does take guts, but I largely overcame my own fear of calling people who I don’t know, through calling a lot of people in a foreign language to just find out silly stuff. I stammered through my first 2 sentences and found that quite uncomfortable, but it got better eventually. I just didn’t have any other choice anyway (apart from not going abroad at all). If you remember the beginning of the post, I also mentioned that I don’t like speaking in front of people: next year I will have a teaching position, what better way is there to combat my fears?
• You feel stuck with pointless repetitive tasks? You hate doing household chores? Well, most of them are not too bad if you have a routine. Latest every Sunday I bring the rubbish out. I clean the sink in my room latest the day after I washed my long hair. I do the laundry latest every 4 weeks – sounds long? Well, I do have a lot of clothes and I try to do more than one load at a time to save money on the dryer. Every day I try to spend 5 minutes tidying up. This way I only have to do a little every day to keep things in order instead of having this huge long house hold list. There’s not much more you can do about these tasks than to find a way to deal with them.
• Too boring? Well, there’s a lot you can do about this one: a) generally stop doing stuff that is boring for you. Pay other people to do these tasks, automate them, or: change your job! b) make them less boring. But how? One of my deadlines last year was – even though it was a lot more exciting than other tasks I had – still quite boring, especially after I figured out that solving one of the subtasks made the rest really easy. Suddenly I was done and I couldn’t bring myself to tidy up my code, which was quite a mess, because I knocked it up as I went without any beforehand planning. Refactoring code (i.e. tidying it up) is really boring and can be quite hideous, because afterwards you spend ages trying to find little bugs you introduced, when rewriting things. To make me do it I followed an idea I had that was not necessary for the deadline. I wanted to write a little genetic algorithm to optimize some parameters for a part of this coursework. If you don’t know what I’m talking about: To do that I had to tidy up my code and writing this algorithm was actually a lot more interesting than the coursework itself!

Use your urge to procrastinate to identify the things that need improvement in your life. You don’t need to cope with too hard, too easy, too scary, too pointless, too boring tasks: just improve your tasks and you can gain a lot of new knowledge fun and a bigger sense of achievement out of your chores. Wouldn’t it feel better to specifically battle your fears than to do something you don’t like without knowing why? Start thinking about what you’re avoiding the most and change your life for the better!

Check out the other articles featured in the productivity week:

• Why being busy isn’t necessarily being productive
• On the meaning of productivity
• How to make your procrastination productive –
  Part 2
• Productivity tips from a busy bee

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