The Work You Love Can Also Be Procrastination

I have a productivity problem that wears respectable clothes.

Give me a research question or a piece of software refusing to behave, and three hours can be eaten alive before I notice the bones.

Meanwhile, applications, emails and administrative work stand outside knocking like creditors.

The embarrassing part is that I am not wasting time. I am working.

That is what makes the deception convincing.

Psychologists call one version of this productive procrastination: replacing an important task with another useful but less important one. The desk is busy. The priority is still starving.

Research also describes flow as deep absorption in an activity—focused, rewarding and almost effortless. Flow can produce excellent work. It can also make time disappear with the efficiency of a trained kidnapper.

The danger begins when we confuse absorption with discipline.

The work I love offers immediate rewards. A stubborn bug can be defeated. A research problem can surrender a new idea. Progress flashes on the screen and congratulates me.

An application offers something less seductive: forms, uncertainty and the possibility of rejection. An email may sit unanswered. Administrative work rarely produces fireworks. Nobody has ever opened a spreadsheet and heard angels sing.

So the mind chooses the fascinating task, then hires productivity as its lawyer.

I noticed the fraud when some days ended with impressive output but little movement in the areas deciding my next stage of life. I had built, researched and solved things. The applications were still waiting.

A person can therefore be hardworking and avoidant at the same time.

My correction is brutally simple. The necessary work comes first. Applications. Important emails. The boring machinery that keeps a life moving.

Research and software come afterwards—not as punishment, but as reward.

This is not an argument against deep work. It is an argument against using meaningful work as an elegant hiding place.

We often imagine procrastination as laziness lying on a sofa. Sometimes it is ambition sitting upright, opening seventeen tabs and completing the wrong important thing.

Discipline is not always forcing yourself to work.

Sometimes it is forcing yourself to stop doing the work you would happily do all day, so the work you owe your future can finally begin.

Abraham Ikongshul Ashindortiang

Sources

Piers Steel: The Nature of Procrastination

Westgate et al.: Productive Procrastination

Investigating the Flow Experience