Productive Procrastination

One of my favorite professors at Stanford was a philosophy professor named John Perry. I took several classes from Professor Perry and I loved that he viewed it as his role to challenge our thinking. After one particularly animated debate, I remember Professor Perry leaning over and telling me “I actually agree with you, but they don’t pay me to agree with you.”

But beyond the practice in critical thinking and testing my assumptions, one of the most practical things he taught me was the idea of productive procrastination. Professor Perry believed (and experience has taught me) that we all procrastinate. We all have times where we push off something that we need to do, but perhaps don’t want to do — at least not right now.

I’m a fan of pushing myself to drive past these thoughts and do what needs to be done. But I also accept that sometimes I will come up short — and I will procrastinate. But here’s the key insight — procrastination doesn’t have to be wasted time. It can be productive?

Most of the time when we procrastinate, we look for something easy, mindless, and close by. We open up Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or a new feed and scroll through the headlines. And how often after 20 minutes of wasted time do we feel guilty — and realize that the time was truly wasted

But what if instead, we did something that was productive? Something that we enjoyed, but was actually useful for us. We could turn our procrastination into a long-term productive goal.

I’ve found this to be incredibly helpful. I also find it’s useful to think in advance about what productive procrastination activities might be. For me, these tend to be things that are separate from work or family obligations that I generally enjoy but don’t have enough time for. It also helps if they are things you can do in short snippets of time. Personally, I like activities that are areas of personal development for me.

So, I keep a list in my notebook of a few things I could do to procrastinate (given my love of the number 3, I typically have 3 of them). Here are my current 3 items:

• Study Chinese (I’m in an adult beginner class)
• Read Blinkist (I have a waiting list of fast books)
• Code (I have a side project I’m working on)

I highly encourage you to have a list like this — and keep it handy as a reminder when you start wasting time that if you’re going to avoid doing something — at least avoid it by doing something productive!

Originally published at https://jeffkeltner.com on March 25, 2019.