photo credit: s2art

Someday is not a day of the week.

— Anonymous

In her posts, Ellie has been beating up on the devil of procrastination.  As I’ve been reading what she’s been writing, I’ve been wrestling with the idea of procrastination myself.  I’m not so sure procrastination is such a bad guy.  Let me tell you why.

First of all, let’s be clear.  When we call a behavior “procrastination” we’ve already judged the behavior as less desirable than “gettin’ – R – done.”  As a matter of fact, when I went looking for definitions, I found this at en.wiktionary.org:  “The act of postponing, delaying or putting off, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness.” [emphasis mine]

The real question to me is “When looking at the list of things we’d like to accomplish today, did we fill our day with unimportant stuff so we could avoid the task or were we productively procrastinating?”  In her poem, Procrastination, Friend or Foe, Allison makes some points that made me think:

You come to me in the form of creativity.
A thought or writing idea,
that requires immediate attention.
When procrastination comes for a homemaker
it is a friend to the writer.
When procrastination comes for the writer
it is a friend for the homemaker.

Part of our issue with procrastination may be that we have so much to do that we can never get it all done.  In Managing the “Stuff” of Life, I refer to the A-B-C method of time management.  Using this method, each task is assigned a level of importance, A being the most important and C being the least.  One of the keys to the A-B-C method was that we procrastinated on the C items until they either became more important or died from lack of attention.  In this time management system, it was definitely productive procrastination.

For me, dealing with the ordinary tasks of the day can easily crowd out other things which also need to get done.  When I came home after my last trip to work on clearing out my folks’ home, I brought pictures and samples of items that need to be valued and distributed among us kids or sold.  The problem is that before I ever started the project of clearing out the house, I already had more than enough to do.  In addition, there is really nothing in the valuation, distribution and sale process that I know how to handle.  My initial plan had been to work through friends who have been in this field for years, but they’re unavailable for at least a month.  I tell myself that I need to find someone else BUT if I just wait it out, they’ll be available again.  Time will have passed.  Maybe I should be making progress, but whatever I do, progress will be slow because I don’t know what I’m doing and learning always takes time.

Unbalanced!!??

Am I procrastinating?  Probably, but with a purpose.  The real issue here is that I feel guilty taking the “easy” way out (waiting for the friends).  I’m not being lazy.  I’m not sitting around eating bon bons. (Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bon bon.)  I’m doing what Allison describes in her poem.  I’m addressing other tasks which are part of my responsibility.  What time I’m not putting in on valuing the “estate” property, I’m working on the blog, exercising, learning to invest, cooking healthy meals, participating in Book Club…

The temptation is to say that exercising or cooking healthy or participating in the Book Club aren’t important because I have all these other things I HAVE to do.  But that way lies madness or at least losing any sense of balance that I’ve managed to create.  I did that over Christmas, working 10-15 hours/day on clearing out the house.  I learned that doesn’t work for me.  Since all deadlines around this activity are self-imposed, I need to be flexible about the timing.

Check the Energy Meter

Another reason that I may choose to not tackle a particular task right now is a lack of energy.  Going back to the task of disposing of all my folks’ stuff, there are two types of energy required for handling this task; physical and emotional.  When I’m working at the folks’ house, I need to keep moving, so I cycle between handling the things which are emotionally challenging and dealing with the tasks that just require physical stamina.  I also find it helpful to cycle between decision making tasks and non-decision making tasks.  This can look and feel like procrastination, but in the end, the overall job gets closer to completion because I make progress on several different fronts throughout the day.

I find one other area impacts my ability to make progress on my task list, and that’s the “mood” I’m in.  By this I don’t mean mood in the traditional sense.  My work tasks tend to fall into one of two “moods”:  creative or analytical.  If I can work on a set of tasks that all belong in one “mood,” I’m much more productive.  For example, balancing the checkbook and paying bills don’t mix well with writing or other creative tasks.  The precision required of the accounting tasks is counter-productive when I’m trying to be creative.  Staying within one “mood” or the other allows me to build momentum and as long as I’m not fighting a deadline, I can choose to work at creative tasks today and do the numbers work tomorrow.  Some would view this as procrastinating on the numbers work.

When I choose to work on task A, by definition, I am NOT working on the other tasks.  Depending on what else is on my ToDo list, there are probably several tasks that I’d prefer to defer until “later” and also need to be done.  I guess that could be called procrastination.  Or taking a positive view of it, I’ll just call it time management.