Working Hard, Hardly Working.
Sunday mornings are slow. Don’t ask me why, I don’t make the rules around here. Last Sunday, I got out of bed and stumbled towards the bathroom, doing my best to erase the sleep from my eyes with the back of my palm. On the way, I picked up my toothbrush and my towel in either hand, ready to get clean and carpe the diem. I placed the towel on the rack absent-mindedly and turned towards the sink to brush my teeth. I saw it happen from the corner of my eye. The towel, once stationary, took a kamikaze dive off the rack. Channeling my years of extensive ninja training, I swung my right arm back and caught it.
But at what cost?
In that moment, I was elated from catching the towel with my reflexes. But I was also disgusted. Why? I dropped my toothbrush on the bathroom floor. In the rush to save my towel, I had inadvertently opened my other hand and sacrificed my toothbrush.
Here are the facts of the situation: Both the towel and the toothbrush were important. But only one went in my mouth, and I had spare towels. If I had to choose, I would drop the towel a million times instead, but the reality turned out different. In a moment of urgency, I had made the wrong decision.
You and I can both agree that dropping the toothbrush for the towel was a brain fart. But we do the same thing over and over in our own lives… on purpose. You’re probably thinking “hold up, I’ve never dropped my toothbrush.” But let me ask you a question. How many times have you ignored writing your blog while you scrolled on Twitter till your wrist hurt? How many times has a life-changing idea been completely forgotten after one episode turned into a four and a half hour Queen’s Gambit binge? Feeling slightly attacked? Yeah, me too.
We all procrastinate. It’s a fact of life. But when we think about procrastination, we often think about familiar culprits like Netflix and social media. These are obvious, but there’s another, more sinister form of procrastination that often goes unseen. Consider activities like cleaning your room, reading a book or Facetiming your best friend. Objectively, these are all good things. But placed in context, they can all serve as distractions from pursuing our more important goals. I took to calling this kind of faux productivity “procrastivity”, only to find out that the term already existed in psychological circles.
Productive procrastinations like checking emails make us feel better, because unlike Netflix, we consider them to be “good” things. By doing them instead of spending time on our major tasks, we get the benefits of procrastination (avoiding work, instant gratification) without the same consequences (sense of wasted time, feeling bad). And that’s why they’re so dangerous. We don’t see them as distracting from our goals, so we engage in them guilt-free, not realising that we’re dropping toothbrushes for towels. Choose the towel for a day, and it’s not that bad. But keep repeating the same mistake, and all of a sudden, another year has gone by with your fitness goals painfully intact and your fupa jiggling back at you in the mirror.
One of my favourite scenes in the movie Minari is when the main character David, a young boy, spots a snake and throws a stone at it. His grandma Soonja explains that stones could make the snake slink away and hide. She continued with something simple yet profound. It was better to see the snake because “hidden things are more dangerous and scary.” Doing “productive” things that aren’t your main goals is simply hiding the python of procrastination under the guise of goodness. Don’t fall for it.
Confession. Sometimes, it’s kinda hard to tell what is procrastivity and what isn’t. For instance, while twiddling my thumbs on writing this article, I spent an hour watching a David Perell video about writing online. Sue me. Looking back, that was definitely procrastivity, but in the moment, I could not tell. Thankfully, there’s a tool we can employ to help us distinguish between towels and toothbrushes. Named after productivity legend (and US President, nbd) Dwight Eisenhower, the Eisenhower Decision Matrix helps us identify what is truly important and what is simply a hidden distraction.
Eisenhower lived his life guided by a simple principle — “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” From that iconic statement, we get a simple tool. It’s a box is divided into four quadrants:
- Important/Urgent — Do these tasks ASAP
- Important/Not Urgent — Decide where these fit on your schedule
- Not Important/Urgent — Delegate these where possible
- Not Important/Not Urgent — Delete these from your schedule
To get the best from the matrix though, you’ll need to answer two key questions. These questions, recommended by author and procrastination assassin James Clear, will help you *clearly* see which activities should fall into each quadrant.
Question 1: What am I working toward?
Question 2: What are the core values that drive my life?
Having well-defined answers to each of these questions and using the matrix should drive you to consistently work towards your real goals and avoid procrastivity. Hopefully, unlike me, you drop fewer toothbrushes for towels.
