“Procrastivity” (or: the mistakes that keep us productive on the wrong things)

Let’s face the obvious truth: we are overwhelmed by information. I’m not talking about low-quality social media streaming where the SNR (signal-noise ratio) is extremely low, like one decent piece of information every 100 funny videos of kids reacting to kitties. Even if you are deliberately searching and picking only really valuable information, sometimes you find yourself reading and watching for hours things that may be valuable, but they are not really needed at this moment, compared to your real ultimate goals. Everyone (wannabe) successful person obsessed by productivity knows at least the Eisenhower Matrix:

and, as suggested by Tim Ferriss’ “Tools of Titans”, ask yourself “Is that a dream, or a goal? Because a dream is something you fantasize about that will probably never happen. A goal is something you set a plan for, work toward, and achieve. The people who were successful models to me were people who had structured goals and then put a plan in place to get to those things.” (from his interview with Paul Levesque, page 130).

Then, the recipe is really clear:

• you choose one or more path in your life (see “Designing you life“);
• break/subdivide your project(s) in small tasks, as the Romans said “divide et impera”
• identify your activities in the Eisenhower Matrix (see also GTD method by David Allen);
• achieve your (SMART) goals.

So, an easy instruction set to follow for an adult, especially if you can focus and reach the flow in your deep work (yes, these are 2 books that you could have seen in my list). After all, we like to think that, compared to the average guy, we are smarter, allocating all our time in absorbing and developing knowledge, not wasting our precious hours watching trash TV programs or going out just to have small talks with “empty” people, right?

Well… actually, it turned out that a lot of people just worry about being productive, making the more tasks as possible before the end of the day: they do try really hard, but finally realizing they are like hamsters in the wheel, in such cases ending in stressful lives like in this famous short by Steve Cutts:

So, why we fall?

Since Seneca (circa 4 BC – A.D. 65), it was known that:

Non exiguum temporis habemus, sed multum perdidimus. Satis longa vita.

“It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough.” (from “De Brevitate Vitae” translated as “On the Shortness of Life”), combined with another quote from him:

Ignoranti quem portum petat nullus suus ventus est

(again for non-Latin speakers: “When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind”), so I take for granted that you have at least a small goal to pursue. Just be sure it’s not the wrong one because our productivity era can lead to horrible results: Zygmunt Bauman (Polish sociologist and philosopher, 1925-2017, world-famous author of “Liquid Modernity”) wrote about “Modernity and the Holocaust” (1989) that only modern industrial and bureaucratic paradigms made the Holocaust possible: all the people and the machines in the process were very efficient and productive, just used in a wrong direction (making not goods, but corpses). If you think that more education could save us from another horrible tragedy like that, please keep in mind that Bauman also wrote: “It was not illiterate savages, but graduates of the finest educational systems of the West who designed the gas chambers used to burn millions of innocent men, women, and children in Germany.”

OK, now that we know that productivity can be useless (or even harmful), what can do to make good use of it? As usual, the key is awareness. One of the big “enemies” to the completion of our important tasks could be (in addition to the vast availability of information) the Multipotentiality – an educational and psychological term that Emilie Wapnick changed a little bit in “Multipotentialite”, here’s her TED talk:

It’s not a bad thing itself, but Multipotentiality makes it easier to get distracted in a world with endless possibilities.

The awkward pitfall – and how to overcome it!

The real opponent that could slow you down while you’re trying to run on the road to a satisfying life, it’s something I often thought about and… now finally it has a name, a fancy portmanteau: have you ever heard the word “Procrastivity”?

From Urban Dictionary, Procrastivity is “The act of being productive in something you don’t actually need to be doing in order to put off the work that you should be doing”.  In other terms, it’s a sneaky form of procrastination, a sort of Trojan horse of avoidance. Also known as productive procrastination, procrastivity is defined as putting off one’s priority task to escape to a lower priority, but still productive task.

Professor J. Russell Ramsay (co-founder and co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Adult ADHD Treatment and Research Program) wrote a paper and a couple of articles about it. He explained: “Procrastivity is at play when a college student is suddenly driven to do laundry rather than writing a paper, or mowing the lawn is more important than working on income taxes.”

Usually, compared with priority tasks, procrastivity tasks have the 4 following features:

1. They tend to be manual or “hands on” (cleaning the desk, washing the dishes and, among intellectual tasks, reading instead of writing);
2. They offer a familiar script of onboarding steps for getting started (something you’re comfortable with or that has a clear set of instruction you already know);
3. There is a clearer sense of making and maintaining progress (e.g.: when you iron your clothes, you see an increase in the pile of ironed shirts);
4. There is a clear end point: this fact comes with a visceral sense of satisfaction of task completion, compared to something that has not a clear stopping point (like writing your own book).

The same author, in another article, suggests 4 possible tips to overcome procrastivity:

1. Make the important task (you’re avoiding) more manual and actionable, at the very least for getting started (For a student, the manual step might be “get to the library” or “open the essay file.”);
2. Script out the initial onboarding steps for engagement (they function to turn the abstract idea of what we plan to do into specific steps);
3. Create a “bounded task” plan with a start- and end-time: Most priority tasks will require more than one work session to finish it, such as taxes or an essay, or persistent efforts across time, such as exercise; The ideal is to set an appointment for a task with a reasonable, minimal time frame and a specific clock time, such as “At 9 a.m. on Saturday, I’ll spend at least 30 minutes on studying the foreign language I want to master, ending at 9:30 a.m.” – a recent study by University of Tel Aviv shows that “Cognitive performance is enhanced if one knows when the task will end” (sure you know about the famous Pomodoro tecnick, so I suggest also a little bit of time tracking to know more how much time you really need to complete a task);
4. Define a minimal, achievable task objective that provides a target for completion: Another aspect of procrastivity tasks is that they tend to offer clear stopping points when the task is done, such as mowing the lawn. Time-bounding mentioned above is helpful on this front to at least provide a time-based definition for being done, at least for a particular work block.

This syndrome is perhaps no worse than extreme laziness, but it is certainly much more subtle. I hope I helped you recognize it and fight it. Have a productive, yet meaningful time!