I’m embarrassed by how long I’ve put off writing about procrastination.
Actually, that may not be the right word. Procrastination is about putting off until later something you could do now. Waiting for the looming deadline to create enough anxiety for you to power through. That’s a “what”, but it doesn’t tell you the “why”.
And I’m thinking of a specific “why”.
In agencies, like, well, every other workplace on the planet, we face a diverse list of daily tasks. But they are not all equal. Some are daunting taking 6 months and hundreds of hours. Some are intrinsically motivating. Some are mindless boring. Some are absolutely trivial. But what they all have in common is that they all need to get done.
This post is about the tiny tasks. Because those are the sneaky ones.
Here’s what I’ve figured out for me. Maybe it’ll sound familiar to you.
Tasks take wildly different amounts of work to complete. But (and this is only slightly a metaphor) they take up the same amount of space on my to-do list. Each is a line item.
When I’m buried in a tasty brief, I left those tiny, Tribble-like troubles pile up. “I’ll knock it out later”. “I’ll do it tonight”. “It’ll only take a few minutes.”
But just because it’s temporarily off my plate doesn’t mean it’s off my mind. Those trivials have a way of distracting me all day. I think about the colleague waiting for it and the progress stalled by it.
By the time I get around to that 3-minute task, it’s spent the whole day siphoning my productivity piecemeal.
That’s the type of procrastination I’m on about. And it’s a particularly foul poison. So don’t take shots of it.
You may be thinking to yourself “If I drop everything to do the small jobs, how will I ever complete the big jobs?” That’s a fair question. I’d say you have a choice.
And it’s a clear choice for me.
I’d rather have three undivided hours today to work on a large, motivating creative opportunity than six hours to think about it with a bunch of gremlins grabbing for my attention.
*10 minutes is an objective measure of time. 600 seconds. Don’t be optimistic. And certainly don’t let someone else convince you that a task will only take 10 minutes. It’ll take 6 minutes just to open the file.
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