Productive procrastination is when you’re busy, yet you’re still procrastinating on your most important tasks. For example:You work 8 -10h workdays, you’re always busy, and you feel that you’re productive. But you’re not as productive as you think. Is your big project done? Is it even moving in any direction? If the answer is “not exactly”, you’re presumably a victim of productive procrastination. By keeping yourself busy with a lot of to-do’s, you distract yourself from doing the work. The work that’s important and impactful still remains untouched.

Productive Procrastination

Productive procrastination is when you’re efficient and accomplish everything (except for the most important things).For example: When having a hard project to crack, you may find yourself doing:<ul><li>laundry</li><li>the dishes</li><li>cleaning the house</li><li>washing your car</li><li>organizing files on the computer</li><li>cleaning the bathroom</li><li>cooking.</li></ul>You actually worked and achieved something.  Procrastinating doesn’t have to mean “doing nothing”. You can still do low-level, unimportant stuff. Productive procrastinators are great workers. They are able to do a lot of work, provided it is not the one they should be doing at the moment.

Productive Procrastination: The Positive Side

Time blocking is a great way to procrastinate in a productive way.  You can take a few moments to plan your day if you don’t feel like starting that big project.  It will keep you on track for the rest of the day.The productive procrastination technique focuses on a specific worldview: If you can’t make it great, at least make it.  This approach doesn't perceive procrastination as the opposite of productivity. Even if you’re not working on the task you set out to do, you’re still making progress on eliminating slices of your productivity pie.

If You Can’t Make It Great, At Least Make It 

Before you know it, you are working on tasks that distract you from what you should be doing. You’re busy and you’re getting a lot of tasks done. You feel good about yourself.  In reality, you’re actually killing your productivity levels. If you are close to falling into this trap:<ul><li>Don’t use busyness to protect yourself from doing the things that you should. This way you fail to reach your dreams.</li><li>Hard work doesn’t equal success. It can be its component if you work hard on the right tasks and activities. Think about it. If hard work equaled success, all construction workers would be millionaires</li></ul>

Productive Procrastination: The Negative Side

When you procrastinate in the usual way, you almost always realize it. You hardly ever realize when you fall into the trap of productive procrastination.   Think about those days when you: answer a lot of emails, spend time on social media, or do other random to-do’s. You feel very productive. Your brain rewards you for this behavior. It produces dopamine when you’re working on a lot of different tasks. This, in turn, stimulates the repetition of this behavior. But productive procrastination is unproductive in the long run.

What’s the Trap About?

<ul><li>Learn to identify your most important activities: write them down.  If you have more than 5 tasks that you think are important, take a few minutes to identify your top 5. If you work on any other task before spending time on your identified top, you’re falling into the trap.</li><li>Tackle your most important activities first thing in the day. Don’t work on anything else before you finish your work on your most important activity.  Most people work on low to mid-value tasks first because it’s easier. As we go by during the day, our mental resources, like willpower and our ability to focus diminish. </li></ul>

Tips to Avoid Falling for Productive Procrastination

“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. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important”

Productive procrastination is when you're efficient but not effective. You accomplish everything, except for the most important things.

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Productive Procrastination: How to Avoid Falling Into the Trap

You have to realize that sometimes it is procrastination and sometimes it is just you allocating time in a more effective way. You must realize whether you are actually procrastinating or do you genuinely don't have enough time One suggestion is saying that it doesn't count as procrastination unless you planned to do the activity

1. Not Knowing the Difference between real or fake Procrastination

We as humans naturally procrastinate because we are always thinking of benefiting ourselves in the short term rather than the long term. So when we realize that we are procrastinating it makes no sense to be mad at ourselves rather we should acknowledge we are procrastinating and make the conscious decision whether we are going to continue procrastinating or rather go and accomplish our life goal.

2. Beating Ourselves Up

If we realize that we are not doing what we are supposed to do rather than just saying "I need to try harder" and " This isn't good enough" We should instead focus on changing how we go about doing things. We need to learn to make things easier for ourselvesTrying harder is rarely ever the solution

3. We Press The Try Harder Button 

If we have the mindset that, I am a human I can just try harder and accomplish anything I set my mind to we will undoubtedly fail here are some steps that we should take instead<ol><li>Make it easier for ourselves to accomplish the goal that we want by telling other people, making a reward system or many other ways.</li></ol>

4. We Treat Ourselves As Humans Rather Than Systems

If you already don't want to accomplish the goal, or you hate doing the task and you feel like you have to do it. The chances you will fail will be very highHumans only have a limited amount of willpower available to them each day, so make sure that you figure out ways to enjoy the tasks that you have to do.

5. Trying To Push The Bolder Up The Hill

Procrastination is a very interesting topic, with a lot of information about it here are 5 things that many people mistake about procrastination<ol><li>Not Knowing the Difference between real or fake Procrastination</li></ol>2. Beating Ourselves Up3. We Press The Try Harder Button 4. We Treat Ourselves As Humans Rather Than Systems

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Finding it difficult to get out of procrastination station? These are the five mistakes I found myself making a lot with work that might help you too. 00:00 Intro 00:09 Real vs. Fake Procrastination 01:40 Beating Ourselves Up 03:00 Pressing the "Try Harder" Button 04:08 People vs. Systems 05:56 The Uphill Boulder MENTIONED IN THE VIDEO: ✍️ My friend Neel Nanda's blog: https://www.neelnanda.io/ 🏋️ Try the app Strong: https://www.strong.app/ 💌 For weekly insights of what I've learned from navigating life, sign up to my email newsletter: https://go.aliabdaal.com/sundaysnippets MY FREE ONLINE COURSES: 🚀 Productivity Masterclass - Principles and Tools to Boost Your Productivity - https://go.aliabdaal.com/course/productivity 🎬 Video Editing with Final Cut Pro X - From Beginner to YouTuber - https://go.aliabdaal.com/course/video-editing 🎓 How to Study for Exams - An Evidence-Based Masterclass - https://go.aliabdaal.com/course/studying MY FAVOURITE GEAR: 🎥 My YouTube Camera Gear - https://kit.co/AliAbdaal ⌨️ My Keyboard - Wireless Coral mechanical keyboard (Cherry Blue) - https://go.aliabdaal.com/keyboard 📝 My favourite iPad Screen Protector - Paperlike - https://go.aliabdaal.com/paperlike 🎒 My Desk Accessories + Todo List - Ugmonk - https://go.aliabdaal.com/ugmonk MY FAVOURITE SOFTWARE: ✍️ The best summaries of books (Shortform) - https://go.aliabdaal.com/shortform 📚 How I remember what I read (Readwise) - https://go.aliabdaal.com/readwise 🎵 Where I get my Music (amazing for YouTubers) - https://go.aliabdaal.com/epidemicsound PS: Some of the links in this description are affiliate links that I get a kickback from 😜

5 Mistakes Procrastinators Make (And How To Avoid Them...)

Have a to-do list longer than you know what to do with, or where to start? Feeling overwhelmed? Try giving your tasks an ROI value. ROI stands for return on investment. Usually, we want the highest ROI possible; it is a measure of how well the sale of a product or service went compared to how much we invested in things like ads, free trainings/webinars, our time invested.

Your Tasks Have An ROI

ROI is a common calculation in sales, and is usually calculated by dividing the investment by the return.Normally our ROI tells us how well a sale or promotion went for us. The higher the ROI means we made more per sale in relation to our costs for that product launch. The ROI for tasks that we are about to talk about is a number (1–4) assigned to each item on our to-do list or brain dump. It is the value we will get out of a task (our return) based on the amount of effort (our investment) we put into getting the task complete.

The ROI Equation

Not only does this method give us the MITs (Most Important Tasks) to work on first but it also can even eliminate things on our to-do lists because we see they are “1’s” and may end up deciding they are not worth the effort at all.  Whenever you have a long to-do list and just don’t know where to start. This could also be something you use daily, or weekly during your planning sessions to give you an idea of the tasks that you should begin with to make your day the most productive it can be.

ROI On Your To-Do List

Have a to-do list longer than you know what to do with, or where to start? Feeling overwhelmed? Try giving your tasks an ROI value. Here’s how ROI stands for return on investment. Usually, we want…

How to start when you have no idea where to start

Procrastination has been deemed the quintessential self-regulatory failure—putting off tasks despite knowing we will be worse off as a consequence. Seeing as ADHD itself is a developmental problem of self-dysregulation—a chronic, persistent delay in the acquisition and employment of the foundational self-regulatory capacities, known as the executive functions—it is no surprise that procrastination is among, if not the most commonly cited presenting problem faced by adults with ADHD seeking treatment.

Procrastination And ADHD

Procrastivity is a sneaky form of procrastination, a sort of Trojan horse of avoidance. Also known as productive procrastination, procrastivity is defined as putting off one’s priority task to escape to a lower priority, but still productive task. Procrastivity is at play when a student is suddenly driven to do laundry rather than writing a paper, or mowing the lawn is more important than working on income taxes. Procrastivity is a way to gain smaller-sooner comfort by getting something done, but at the cost of the larger-later and often more important payoff from finishing the priority task.

Procrastivity, Or Productive Procrastination

Everyone—ADHD or not—puts off tasks, including via procrastivity. Adults with ADHD, though, are at greater risk for experiencing more significant negative effects and impairments from it.But what is it about procrastivity tasks that make them magically more enticing than priority tasks? The laundry and yard work themselves likely had been objects of procrastination before. Why the motivation to do them now?A reverse engineering of procrastivity and the nature of the tasks used to avoid higher priorities offer some important lessons abouttheir particular features.

Why Put-off Tasks Are Used To Put Off Other Tasks

1) They tend to be manual or “hands on”Procrastivity tasks tend to be more manual or hands-on than priority tasks. Priority tasks, on the other hand, are more mentally challenging, exacting greater cognitive load, such as administrative tasks, writing, homework, and many others. Even among these intellectual tasks, such as different homework assignments, there is a personal rock-paper-scissors algorithm of difficulty, such as “writing is harder than reading” and “reading is harder than a problem set.”

The Characteristics Of Procrastivity Tasks

2) They offer a familiar script of onboarding steps for getting startedFor the procrastivity tasks mentioned above, laundry and mowing the lawn, there is a clear, well-rehearsed set of steps to perform for getting started that is viewed as more “doable” than the higher priority task. This makes getting started on those tasks easier and probably fuels justifications for escape in the form of the thought “I’ll do this other thing first, then I’ll me ‘in the mood’ for the priority task.” (Have you ever really been "in the mood" for laundry or taxes?)

3) There is a clearer sense of making and maintaining progressWith procrastivity tasks, you can see the laundry and lawn getting done with a corresponding decrease in the amount of time and effort remaining, a countdown until the task is done. With most priority tasks, more than one work session is required, such as writing a paper or completing taxes, and there is a possibility of surprises or difficulties with the task that could conceivably end up taking more time and effort than was originally anticipated.

4) There is a clear end pointThere is a clear stopping point with most procrastivity tasks at the job is completed and off the to-do list. This fact comes with a visceral sense of satisfaction of task completion, even with chores and other administrative matters. This positive feeling is underestimated despite the fact that procrastivity tasks are not the most existentially fulfilling matters. It feels good to get things done. And due to the vagaries and uncertainties inherent in many priority tasks, it is difficult to determine an exact end point that one is confident can be reached.

Even in cases of a clear deadline, such as for homework or taxes, there is uncertainty about how much progress will be made during the time spent on the priority task, which opens the door for escape to a task with greater certainty. In fact, many people are willing to devote more time and energy to a procrastivity task than to the priority task because the certainty of the outcome is more desirable to one’s sense of efficacy, the belief that one can do it. Thus, two hours of yard work is preferable to 45 minutes working on taxes.

The puzzle of procrastinating via procrastivity, of avoiding tasks via avoided tasks, and the characteristics of procrastivity tasks that can perhaps help us turn procrastination against itself. 

Part 1: Lessons learned that can help you turn procrastination against itself

Procrastivity (a.k.a. Sneaky Avoidance) and Adult ADHD Coping

<ul><li>We've been taught to be expert procrastinators, and it's finally catching up with us</li><li>As adults, we're taking procrastination into our businesses and our relationships, and rather than spending time completing the tasks that actually matter, we are pushing everything off</li><li>The "It can wait" mindset has made people think that everything can wait when in reality, some things can't.</li></ul>

It's not your fault

Just because the sky won't fall doesn't mean you should wait to complete the tasks that are important to you todayCreating a list of three key things to complete each day is the number one tip to produce long-term, sustainable growth within both yourself and your business. If you can't trust yourself to complete tasks set before you, then who can?

Complete the task

While it's true that your cycle of procrastination isn't entirely your fault, it's also true that it will be your fault if you don't decide you want things to be different.

Productive Procrastination: How to Avoid Falling Into the Trap

5 Mistakes Procrastinators Make (And How To Avoid Them...)

How to start when you have no idea where to start

Procrastivity (a.k.a. Sneaky Avoidance) and Adult ADHD Coping

It's Not Your Fault: We've Been Taught to Be Expert Procrastinators

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