Serious Simplicity

Even worse than procrastination is a bout of negative productivity.

Procrastination can be irritating but at least its somewhat in your hands. Negative productivity comes about from events that happen outside of your control but that conspire to drive you nuts. Typically just when you’ve decided to stop procrastinating and get some work done…

This happened to me yesterday.

Having taken a strong decision to spend a solid afternoon working on the upcoming Billy Connolly website, I made coffee, turned on my laptop and prepared to get down to business, little knowing that Fate was thinking “And now, for something completely different!”

Each time I got started with outlining a work plan I was rudely interrupted by various things ranging from soggy sheets stubbornly entangled in each other, delivery of a large box of clothes and books, delivery of a new microwave oven, failed attempts to get rid of old microwave oven, bad internet connectivity, forgotten passwords, and finally, numerous topplings-over of clothes horse under combined weight of said soggy sheets.

By the end of 5 hours, all I had accomplished was writing down a list of 5 to-do items and in the process of doing so had reached such a level of frustration that it was impossible to settle down to do anything productive by then.

So I went out to have a Gynn ‘N’ Tonnick, safely procrastinating further work to the next day :-)

A philosopher friend recently directed me to the work of one John Perry, a philosopher who writes about structured procrastination. A procrastinating philosopher you might say. Of course, I procrastinated for about 2 days before getting around to looking properly at his stuff. He says:

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing.

Apart from being an accomplished procrastinator myself, I was recently looking into procrastination as a tool for positive action. A kind of “stick”, or negative driver if you will, that, by being something people want to avoid, acts as a catalyst inspiring positive action.

One can look at this as a sort of mental martial art, i.e. using a negative trait to your advantage. It’s worth reading his essay and browsing his site if you’ve ever thought of yourself as a procrastinator… while you should be doing something else of course…