Thursday, April 07, 2011
Houston Probate Lawyer Answers, "Can Procrastination Be Good?"
By: Kim Hegwood, Houston Probate Lawyer
The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad?
You see, there are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you are not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.
In my view, there are three kinds of procrastination. Depending on what you do instead of working on something, you could work on:
(a) nothing
(b) something less important, or
(c) something more important.
That last type, I would say, is good procrastination.
This is the "absent-minded professor," who forgets to shave, or eat, or even perhaps look where he is going while he is thinking about some interesting question. His mind is absent from the everyday world because it is hard at work in another.
That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They are type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.
What is "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary. It is hard to say at the time what will turn out to be your best work (will it be your thesis for your PhD, or that detective thriller you worked on at night?), but there is a whole class of tasks you can safely rule out: shaving, doing your laundry, cleaning the house, writing thank-you notes-anything that might be called an errand.
Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.
Good in a sense, at least. The people who want you to do the errands won't think it's good. But you probably have to annoy them if you want to get any real work done. The mildest seeming people, if they want to do real work, all have a certain degree of ruthlessness when it comes to avoiding errands.
Some errands, like replying to emails, go away if you ignore them (perhaps taking friends with them). Others, like mowing the lawn, setting up legal forms or filing your tax returns, only get worse if you put them off. In principle it shouldn't work to put off the second kind of errand. You are going to have to do whatever it is eventually. Why not (as past-due notices are always saying) do it now?
The reason it pays to put off even those errands is that real work needs two things errands do not: big chunks of time, and the right mood. If you get inspired by some project, it can be a net win to blow off everything you were supposed to do for the next few days to work on it. Yes, those errands may cost you more time when you finally get around to them. But if you get a lot done during those few days, you will be net more productive.
So here is where we come in.
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Allow us to take the pain away from these second-level tasks (like establishing the most ideal estate plan possible in this environment)--and you go back to writing that killer novel.
And, of course, here is something which will make it even easier...
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