In defense of procrastination

On feeling called out, obsessing over productivity, and procrastinating by optimizing.

I was listening to You’re Not Lazy: How To Make Discipline Easy¹, a podcast episode in which Ali Abdaal and Ryan Holiday talk about productivity. This part stuck with me.

Ryan: I feel like people are obsessed with productivity and I’m not always sure why. I said this thing once, maybe you agree with it: the amateurs are obsessed with tools. Right? [They will ask] like, “What’s the best software to do this? What is the best way to…” you know? People will go, “What kind of pen do you journal with?” As if this fucking matters at all. Like, “What program do you write with?”
And if I was to rank the things that contribute the most to what I do, tools are like, not even in the top ten. […] People are optimizing a thing they are not doing, which is never going to be the way to get there. […]
Ali: This obsession with productivity… it often feels productive to be reading productivity books, ironically, and researching the tools as a distraction from sitting down and doing the thing.
Ryan: Well, the irony is that obsessing over productivity is a form of procrastination. It’s giving you the sense that you’re serious, that you’re heart is in the right place, that you’re making progress, but in fact you’re not. And you’re avoiding the hard thing, which is doing the thing.

From minute 28:10 to 34:30. In brackets [ ] is mine or skipped.

I get what they mean, and still, it annoyed me. Maybe it was because I was listening to the podcast while cleaning dishes instead of writing. Maybe it’s because I use Zebra Sarasa Clip 0.3 to journal, and, before that, I used the Muji Gel pens 0.38, and I’d hate to use anything else. Maybe it’s because I spent two years excitedly researching what writing software to get—I ended up picking one called LivingWriter². And maybe it’s because I have three different writing trackers pinned over my desk, and I spend at the beginning of every week a bunch of time planning and thinking to do stuff instead of doing it. Oh, and of course, maybe it’s because of those self-help productivity books looking at me from my library (ironically, Feel Good Productivity³ by Ali Abdaal is one of them).

I may have felt called out a little.

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• The perfectionist—researching the ultimate methods and techniques

• The shopper—looking for the best gear

• The environmentalist—aiming for the best atmosphere (tidying up, looking for background music, etc…)

• The researcher—down in the rabbit hole of content research

• The raven—look, something shiny!

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It’s true, and undeniably so: obsessing over productivity is not doing the thing. But, I want to push back: I’m not convinced that obsessing over productivity means not making any progress at all.

Before action comes thought. We cannot do something if we’re not thinking about it. We know the mechanic very well from advertisements: we can’t buy something unless we know it exists. And ads keep on reminding us, over and over again, about this thing we may need. They try to create a persistent thought in our minds so that we end up buying what they offer us.

Well, what if we used that mechanic to our advantage? What if we fill our head with thoughts on the thing we want to do? Indeed, browsing a running shoe catalog is not running, but at least it makes us think of running.

As I wrote in One hour and a half at a time, even if we were to be actively doing whatever we want to do, we can’t do it actively 24 hours a day. Do you want to run? Go out and run for 20 minutes. And after that, what? You can’t just keep on running the whole day (I mean, you could, but… I don’t know that you would want to). What are you left to do after that?

You can keep on thinking about it, though. Keep the thought in your head. So that you go tomorrow and the day after and the day after that again…

Sometimes I may not feel like writing, but I want to tinker with my writing plan for the next month. Also, I like to listen to people talk about writing or books in my low-energy moments, like when it’s afternoon and I have to do some chores: so I listen to some writing podcasts while I take care of stuff around the house. Or I read a book in my downtime.

I find it a good strategy to have an array of different activities that require different energy levels, but that all are connected in some ways to whatever it is you want to be doing more of.

I get it, I get it, I get it. What I’m describing is not procrastinating. I’m talking of what I do when I’m not writing, not necessarily of what I do instead of writing—because, yes, to be fair, I do get some writing done. What Ryan Holiday was talking about is different: he was saying that often we get lost in the optimization of something when we didn’t even get started with it.

And that’s… true. I do find myself getting lost in that little black hole, too. I know that doing the thing (even unoptimized!) is better than optimizing something you’re not doing.

But I wonder if optimizing something you’re not doing is—maybe?—better than not doing anything at all.

It’s tricky because optimizing something you’re not doing doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll eventually do it. You can get stuck endlessly researching all that there is to research, which is also tricky because it can feel more productive than what it is.

But… I wonder if it can also work. Procrastination by optimization can cause you to think more of the thing so that your head is going to be filled so much with it that the only other thing left to do is to act upon it.

If you have any thoughts on what I shared, let me know by simply replying to this email!

Take care,

Rye Youbs

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Correlated entries

One hour and a half at a time

1. You’re Not Lazy: How To Make Discipline Easy — I love to listen to long conversations such as these. Ryan Holiday irks me a little at times, but in a good and challenging way. I’m unhappy with the title, though: if anything, what I got out of the video is that discipline isn’t easy.

2. LivingWriter — for some reason, I just really didn’t want to get Scrivener. I’ve spent countless hours searching and looking for an alternative, and I ended up trying this out. I’m quite happy so far, but I’ve also just started using it. To any other writer out there, what do you use?

3. Feel Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal — the premise of the book is that feeling good about your work helps you be more productive. It offers tips and tricks on energizing yourself, unblocking yourself, and maintaining your energy, to do more of what you love. Overall I found it an interesting read, but (of all things!) the formatting unnerved me: I lost very quickly the overview of the chapters and all the “experiments”, as Ali calls them, that he suggests.