Good and bad procrastination
All the most impressive people I know are horrible procrastinators. So maybe procrastination is not always bad?
Usually writing about procrastination write about how to get rid of it - which, strictly speaking, is impossible. There are an infinite number of things that need to be done, while at whatever work you do, you are not working on everything else. So the question is not how to eliminate procrastination, but how to procrastinate correctly.
There are three types of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of work: you can (A) do nothing, (B) do something less important and (C) do something more important. The last type, I am convinced, is a good, correct procrastination.
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It's like a “scattered professor,” who forgets either to shave, or to eat, or to look at his feet when he thinks about something interesting. His brain is detached from everyday life, because it is busy with other things.
It is in this sense that I called all the impressive people I know procrastinators. They are type B procrastinators: they avoid working on trifles for the sake of working on something big.
What is the "little things"? Roughly speaking, a job that has zero chance of being mentioned in the obituary. Of course, now it is difficult to say what exactly luck will be your best work (whether it will be a magnum opus on the architecture of Sumerian temples or a detective thriller published under a pseudonym), but there is a whole class of tasks that we can safely delete from this list: shaving, washing , cleaning, writing thank-you letters - anything that can be called a duty.
Good procrastination is a deviation from duty for the sake of doing real work.
Good in meaning, at least. Those who want you to fulfill their duties are unlikely to find it good. But you probably have to upset them to really do something. Even the softest-looking people become surprisingly ruthless to everything related to duties when they want to do something great.
Some responsibilities, such as responding to letters, are eliminated by themselves, if you do not pay attention to them (though, sometimes with friends). Others, such as mowing the lawn or paying bills, only get worse if you run them. It seems that you should not put off duties of the second type in the far box. Anyway, sooner or later they will have to do. Why not do it now?
The reason why even these responsibilities should be postponed is that the really important tasks require two things that duties do not need: large continuous time periods and the right mood. If you are inspired by a project, the best solution may be to push all other cases for a few days in order to work on it properly. Yes, perhaps the responsibilities will take more time when they finally reach their hands. But having done a lot of things these days, in the end, you will be much more productive.
In fact, it is likely that the difference lies not in the size of the task, but in its type. Perhaps some types of work can be performed exclusively in a rush of inspiration and during long, uninterrupted time periods, rather than in obediently planned out small approaches. It seems empirically that it is. When I think of people who have done something great, they do not seem to me to be those who meekly remove one item after another from the list of affairs. They seem to me to be dodgers to work on some new idea.
The reverse is also true - the more someone is forced to engage in duties, the more it reduces its productivity. This is a very expensive approach, not only because of the time that responsibilities take by themselves, but also because they destroy the work on a real problem. It is enough for you to distract someone a couple of times a day so that this person in principle cannot work on large tasks.
For a long time I tried to understand why startups are the most productive at the very beginning, when they are just a few guys who are going to be home from one of them. I think the main reason is that at this stage no one distracts them. In theory, when the founders finally have enough money to hire someone, that's good. But it is possible that actually recycle better than distract. As soon as you dilute startups with typical office workers - type B procrastinators - the whole company starts working on their frequency. They are masters of being distracted by duties, and soon you become the same.
Responsibilities so effectively cope with the killing of large projects that many use them precisely for this purpose. For example, a person who has decided to write a novel, suddenly discovers that it is necessary to arrange a general cleaning. People who fail to write a novel, do not fail with their idea, sitting in front of a blank piece of paper for several days in a row. They collapse, feeding the cat, going to buy something for the house, meeting friends for a cup of coffee and checking mail. “I don’t have time to work,” they say. And there really is no time; they took care of it.
(Another common variation is “I have nowhere to work.” Try visiting the places where great people worked and see for yourself how unsuitable they are.)
I myself used both of these tricks over and over again. Over the past 20 years, I learned a bunch of tricks to get myself to work, but even now I don’t always win. Some days I really do a lot of real work, others are eaten by duties. And I know that it’s usually my fault: I’m letting duties gobble up my day to avoid having to face difficult challenges.
This is the most dangerous form of procrastination, the unconscious type B procrastination, because it does not look procrastination. You "did a lot of things." Just not those.
And any advice on combating procrastination, concentrating on deleting tasks from the list, is not just incomplete, but fundamentally wrong, even if it does not consider the possibility that the to-do list itself is type B procrastination. Although, perhaps, the “possibility” is too soft word in this context. Almost always he is. If you don’t work on the biggest tasks you can do, you are a type B procrastinator, and it doesn’t matter how much you manage to do.
In his famous essay “You and Your Research [ Original , HabraTranslate ]” (which I recommend to every ambitious person, regardless of what he is working on), Richard Hemming suggests asking himself three questions:
Hamming worked at Bell Labs when he started asking these questions to his colleagues. By and large, every Bell Labs employee should work on the most important problems in their field. It is believed that not everyone can make an equally dramatic contribution to the development of the world; I do not know; but whatever your possibilities, there are definitely projects that you can handle. So Hamming's litany can be formulated more generally:
Most people shy away from answering. I myself shy away; I see the question on the page and try to move to the next sentence as soon as possible. Hamming, who had really asked his colleagues at the time, was eventually avoided. However, every ambitious person is obliged to look into the eyes of this issue.
The trouble is that with this bait you can catch too big fish. To make something big is not enough just to find a good project. After the project is found, you also have to force yourself to work on it, and this can be difficult. And the bigger the problem, the harder it is to force yourself to work on it.
Of course, the main reason why people find it difficult to work on a particular task is the fact that they do not enjoy it. We often find, especially when we are young, that we are working on things that we don’t like too much - simply because it looks impressive, for example, or because someone else has instructed us to do it. Most graduate students pull the strap, working on large directions that they are not really interested in, which makes the magistracy synonymous with procrastination.
However, even if you like what you do, it is much easier to force yourself to work on small tasks rather than on large ones. Why so? Why is it so hard to work on large projects? The first reason is that you cannot derive any benefit from this in the foreseeable future. When you work on something that can be completed in a day or two, you expect a reward in the form of a pleasant sense of completion in the near future. When a reward is indefinitely far away, getting it seems less realistic.
It's funny, but another reason why people prefer not to work on large projects is the fear of wasting time. What if you don't achieve anything? Then all the time spent will be lost. (In fact, this is highly unlikely, because working on large projects is almost always somewhere, but leads.)
However, the problem with large tasks can not be only that you will not receive instant rewards, or that you can lose a lot of time. If it were a complete list, working on them would be no worse than a trip to the mother-in-law. No, there is definitely something else there. Big projects are terrifying. Facing them face to face causes almost physical pain. They look like a vacuum cleaner connected to your imagination - the original ideas are instantly sucked out, no new ones, and he sucks and sucks.
You can't look a big problem right in the eyes. You have to do it diagonally. But what can be done is to gradually straighten the angle: you need to look at the task straight enough to grasp the inspiration emanating from it, but not enough to be paralyzed by scale. And then you will be able to look more and more bold each time, by analogy with how the ship moves the sails closer and closer to the wind in the direction of travel.
To work on large projects, it seems, you need a number of tricks to fool yourself. You have to work on small things that grow into large ones, or work on gradually increasing tasks, or share the moral burden with colleagues. Going on this kind of tricks is not a sign of weakness. The greatest of accomplishments laid these paths.
When I talk to people who have forced themselves to work on something big, I notice that they all put responsibilities aside and everyone feels guilty about it. I don’t think they should blame themselves. Nobody is capable of redoing everything in the world, so that everyone who does something really important will inevitably have to leave many small things unfulfilled. It seems to me wrong to feel because of this remorse.
In my opinion, the way to “solve” the problem of procrastination is to allow pleasure to carry you along, and not to force the list of affairs to push forward. Work on ambitious projects that you really like, adjust the sails to the wind - and that which should be left undone.
Usually writing about procrastination write about how to get rid of it - which, strictly speaking, is impossible. There are an infinite number of things that need to be done, while at whatever work you do, you are not working on everything else. So the question is not how to eliminate procrastination, but how to procrastinate correctly.
There are three types of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of work: you can (A) do nothing, (B) do something less important and (C) do something more important. The last type, I am convinced, is a good, correct procrastination.
')
It's like a “scattered professor,” who forgets either to shave, or to eat, or to look at his feet when he thinks about something interesting. His brain is detached from everyday life, because it is busy with other things.
It is in this sense that I called all the impressive people I know procrastinators. They are type B procrastinators: they avoid working on trifles for the sake of working on something big.
What is the "little things"? Roughly speaking, a job that has zero chance of being mentioned in the obituary. Of course, now it is difficult to say what exactly luck will be your best work (whether it will be a magnum opus on the architecture of Sumerian temples or a detective thriller published under a pseudonym), but there is a whole class of tasks that we can safely delete from this list: shaving, washing , cleaning, writing thank-you letters - anything that can be called a duty.
Good procrastination is a deviation from duty for the sake of doing real work.
Good in meaning, at least. Those who want you to fulfill their duties are unlikely to find it good. But you probably have to upset them to really do something. Even the softest-looking people become surprisingly ruthless to everything related to duties when they want to do something great.
Some responsibilities, such as responding to letters, are eliminated by themselves, if you do not pay attention to them (though, sometimes with friends). Others, such as mowing the lawn or paying bills, only get worse if you run them. It seems that you should not put off duties of the second type in the far box. Anyway, sooner or later they will have to do. Why not do it now?
The reason why even these responsibilities should be postponed is that the really important tasks require two things that duties do not need: large continuous time periods and the right mood. If you are inspired by a project, the best solution may be to push all other cases for a few days in order to work on it properly. Yes, perhaps the responsibilities will take more time when they finally reach their hands. But having done a lot of things these days, in the end, you will be much more productive.
In fact, it is likely that the difference lies not in the size of the task, but in its type. Perhaps some types of work can be performed exclusively in a rush of inspiration and during long, uninterrupted time periods, rather than in obediently planned out small approaches. It seems empirically that it is. When I think of people who have done something great, they do not seem to me to be those who meekly remove one item after another from the list of affairs. They seem to me to be dodgers to work on some new idea.
The reverse is also true - the more someone is forced to engage in duties, the more it reduces its productivity. This is a very expensive approach, not only because of the time that responsibilities take by themselves, but also because they destroy the work on a real problem. It is enough for you to distract someone a couple of times a day so that this person in principle cannot work on large tasks.
For a long time I tried to understand why startups are the most productive at the very beginning, when they are just a few guys who are going to be home from one of them. I think the main reason is that at this stage no one distracts them. In theory, when the founders finally have enough money to hire someone, that's good. But it is possible that actually recycle better than distract. As soon as you dilute startups with typical office workers - type B procrastinators - the whole company starts working on their frequency. They are masters of being distracted by duties, and soon you become the same.
Responsibilities so effectively cope with the killing of large projects that many use them precisely for this purpose. For example, a person who has decided to write a novel, suddenly discovers that it is necessary to arrange a general cleaning. People who fail to write a novel, do not fail with their idea, sitting in front of a blank piece of paper for several days in a row. They collapse, feeding the cat, going to buy something for the house, meeting friends for a cup of coffee and checking mail. “I don’t have time to work,” they say. And there really is no time; they took care of it.
(Another common variation is “I have nowhere to work.” Try visiting the places where great people worked and see for yourself how unsuitable they are.)
I myself used both of these tricks over and over again. Over the past 20 years, I learned a bunch of tricks to get myself to work, but even now I don’t always win. Some days I really do a lot of real work, others are eaten by duties. And I know that it’s usually my fault: I’m letting duties gobble up my day to avoid having to face difficult challenges.
This is the most dangerous form of procrastination, the unconscious type B procrastination, because it does not look procrastination. You "did a lot of things." Just not those.
And any advice on combating procrastination, concentrating on deleting tasks from the list, is not just incomplete, but fundamentally wrong, even if it does not consider the possibility that the to-do list itself is type B procrastination. Although, perhaps, the “possibility” is too soft word in this context. Almost always he is. If you don’t work on the biggest tasks you can do, you are a type B procrastinator, and it doesn’t matter how much you manage to do.
In his famous essay “You and Your Research [ Original , HabraTranslate ]” (which I recommend to every ambitious person, regardless of what he is working on), Richard Hemming suggests asking himself three questions:
- What problems are most significant in your field of activity?
- Do you work on one of them?
- Why not?
Hamming worked at Bell Labs when he started asking these questions to his colleagues. By and large, every Bell Labs employee should work on the most important problems in their field. It is believed that not everyone can make an equally dramatic contribution to the development of the world; I do not know; but whatever your possibilities, there are definitely projects that you can handle. So Hamming's litany can be formulated more generally:
- What is the most important thing you can work on, and why are you not working on it?
Most people shy away from answering. I myself shy away; I see the question on the page and try to move to the next sentence as soon as possible. Hamming, who had really asked his colleagues at the time, was eventually avoided. However, every ambitious person is obliged to look into the eyes of this issue.
The trouble is that with this bait you can catch too big fish. To make something big is not enough just to find a good project. After the project is found, you also have to force yourself to work on it, and this can be difficult. And the bigger the problem, the harder it is to force yourself to work on it.
Of course, the main reason why people find it difficult to work on a particular task is the fact that they do not enjoy it. We often find, especially when we are young, that we are working on things that we don’t like too much - simply because it looks impressive, for example, or because someone else has instructed us to do it. Most graduate students pull the strap, working on large directions that they are not really interested in, which makes the magistracy synonymous with procrastination.
However, even if you like what you do, it is much easier to force yourself to work on small tasks rather than on large ones. Why so? Why is it so hard to work on large projects? The first reason is that you cannot derive any benefit from this in the foreseeable future. When you work on something that can be completed in a day or two, you expect a reward in the form of a pleasant sense of completion in the near future. When a reward is indefinitely far away, getting it seems less realistic.
It's funny, but another reason why people prefer not to work on large projects is the fear of wasting time. What if you don't achieve anything? Then all the time spent will be lost. (In fact, this is highly unlikely, because working on large projects is almost always somewhere, but leads.)
However, the problem with large tasks can not be only that you will not receive instant rewards, or that you can lose a lot of time. If it were a complete list, working on them would be no worse than a trip to the mother-in-law. No, there is definitely something else there. Big projects are terrifying. Facing them face to face causes almost physical pain. They look like a vacuum cleaner connected to your imagination - the original ideas are instantly sucked out, no new ones, and he sucks and sucks.
You can't look a big problem right in the eyes. You have to do it diagonally. But what can be done is to gradually straighten the angle: you need to look at the task straight enough to grasp the inspiration emanating from it, but not enough to be paralyzed by scale. And then you will be able to look more and more bold each time, by analogy with how the ship moves the sails closer and closer to the wind in the direction of travel.
To work on large projects, it seems, you need a number of tricks to fool yourself. You have to work on small things that grow into large ones, or work on gradually increasing tasks, or share the moral burden with colleagues. Going on this kind of tricks is not a sign of weakness. The greatest of accomplishments laid these paths.
When I talk to people who have forced themselves to work on something big, I notice that they all put responsibilities aside and everyone feels guilty about it. I don’t think they should blame themselves. Nobody is capable of redoing everything in the world, so that everyone who does something really important will inevitably have to leave many small things unfulfilled. It seems to me wrong to feel because of this remorse.
In my opinion, the way to “solve” the problem of procrastination is to allow pleasure to carry you along, and not to force the list of affairs to push forward. Work on ambitious projects that you really like, adjust the sails to the wind - and that which should be left undone.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/230227/
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