Don’t get me wrong. Procrastinating isn’t a good thing, but making it a good thing is possible. Today, we’ll look at how to productively procrastinate. In a productivity obsessed world, we often try to avoid procrastination when it is inevitable. So if you find it difficult to defeat procrastination, use it as a tool instead to get more work done.
What is Productive procrastination?
When you first heard of the term, you probably thought it meant spending hours on an important task to get more of it done, but this would only deteriorate your focus making productive procrastination…not so productive after all. Essentially, it is based on spending the time (that would otherwise be wasted) on other areas of our life rather than the ‘important project’. As a result, we feel just as productive as getting an important task completed on its own.
The origin of productive procrastination
The credit goes to *John Perry, a philosophy professor at Stanford, who preferred to call it ‘structured procrastination’. Perry described this as being a hierarchy where an urgent task is at the top and a worthwhile task is at the bottom. Choosing to do the worthwhile task when not doing the urgent task, made clever use of time. Like most of us, he would procrastinate in between grading papers, but during this time he would do other things that would still gain him some sort of benefit. For example, he would often sharpen pencils, saving him much-needed time later on.
Why productively procrastinate?
- This puts off the strain of trying not to procrastinate.
- It helps us stay on top of things -We feel satisfied at the end of the day even if we didn’t get round to doing what we planned.
- Procrastination can be used to decide how to do an important task-By weighing out the pros and cons of a decision, the result creates more time and energy to dive straight into an important task.
- The best ideas come when procrastinating-Taking a break from intense work gives our mind a chance to relax and see things from another perspective.
Productive procrastination can take any form, whether it’s playing the piano or typing up your next blog post. he take-home message from this is that you should be more aware of how you are using your time. Once you get better at this, you’ll have a solid habit of doing something useful every time you enter the state of procrastination.
*If you want to find out more on implementing productive procrastination, check out John Perry’s book-‘Art of Procrastination’
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