With resits coming up, emails waiting to be written, and a handful of decisions I keep postponing, I do what I often do: I sit down with a cup of coffee and start reflecting instead of doing. How come I didn't get to learn for this difficult exam today, but I did craft these birthday presents for my nephews, clean my kitchen, learn this classical piano piece, …
Why do I love being productive, but just not on the things that actually (should) matter to me?
An empty to-do list makes me uneasy, so I start refining it, adding, rephrasing, organizing, until it mirrors the mess in my head. It becomes less of a plan and more of a justification for the stress I feel. And in the end, it’s the same list as always: things I “should” do, someday, with no real urgency. I used to love reading about the perfect productivity tips, hoping that would help me get my life on track. Reading the comment sections, I realized the irony of watching productivity tips as a way to procrastinate.
Somewhere along the way, I did pick up some things that work for me:
Having confidence in my future self
Allow myself to wing it in the future. Not in an unrealistic way, but enough to stop trying to solve every possible problem right now. If I can solve all the doom scenarios right now, my future self should be able to solve the few problems she will actually be facing.
Being kind to my past self
You cannot change that you failed to do x and y in the past. If you feel like you should have done more, take that as a learning opportunity. What you can do now is make sure that you do what you can or decide that you do what you want to do and accept the consequences. No need to punish yourself. Be kind to your future self [TODO]
Setting a timer
Of all the systems I’ve tried, the simplest one stuck: a timer. Most productivity methods I liked were, at their core, just different ways of putting boundaries on time. Telling myself “I’ll work on this until 16:00” works far better than telling myself “I should work on this today.”
Lately, I’ve been using Super Productivity, which makes this easier by turning tasks into actual time blocks. The app allows me to estimate the time I need and track how long it actually takes me. It’s confronting in a good way. It reminds me that seven one-hour tasks don’t fit into one afternoon, no matter how optimistic I feel. And slowly but surely, I learn to make better estimations of how long tasks take.
Maybe productive procrastination isn’t really about avoiding work. Maybe it’s about avoiding the kind of work that asks more from us, such as focus, decisions, and uncertainty. That might explain why I’m being productive on ‘useless’ tasks when I should be working on other tasks.
I’m still figuring that out. But for now, setting a timer and starting somewhere seems to be enough.
By Anne-Wil van den Heuvel (event organizer at TINT)