Procrastinating in its highest form!
Sophisticated procrastination hides avoidance behind productive, important-looking tasks.
An older book on time management came to mind for me this week*. It's main idea is that there are says that there are two ways to procrastinate:
1. For Indulgence: we know we should do something hard, but we clean the house instead or go for the movies.
2. For Purpose: that's the 'smart way'. We intentionally delay a task as we know that doing it at a later stage will be easier, faster or less costly. Maybe because we genuinely know we will have more resources available to us in a few days.
It occured to me yesterday that there is a third way. I call it 'sophisticated procrastination' and I happen to be a black belt at it.
How to do it? You delay the real hard task, but do something else on your task list that is also very very important, also value adding, but that requires less willpower and discipline. It's much harder to root that kind of out, as we genuinely do hard and important work still.
What to do? First, being honest with oneself and admitting to the self-deception. Then finding a technique that helps (I currently put a emoji next to the tasks in my list that I am most likely to procrastinate on)**. Or get a few minutes of coaching by someone you trust!
In what are of your life/work are you a sophisticated procrastinator?