Whenever I procrastinate, the chances are that I've made a small promise to myself to do better. Whether it’s that I’m taking a longer nap than I need to or putting off sending an email I need to send or refusing to seize an opportunity to act on something, that action of procrastinating almost always comes right after a tiny promise I’ve made in my head that I’ll be better “next time”. These promises can also get super complex because I find that to get the “hardworking” part of my body to yield, a detailed explanation as to why more work is being put on the backlog must be given.
For a long time, the complexity of these plans served as a marker to identify when exactly it was okay to procrastinate. In my head, I would quickly run a check to see how much complexity was behind a reason (for procrastinating) for a certain task to decide whether it was okay to yield. If the rationale appeared too simple, I was incredibly likely to rebuff that attempt to procrastinate. Things like: “I’m too tired”, “the sun is too hot”, and “I can do this tomorrow” were unlikely to pass this check because the reasoning always felt too simple. They are always hard to overcome—because things like fatigue and weakness are backed by bodily responses—but they would set off red sirens because I was aware that these reasons were possibly “lazy” attempts to procrastinate.
But over the past few months, a lot of my procrastination has not come from instances where I’ve put off doing things because of the whim of the moment. I’m procrastinating less because of bodily impulses, but because I’ve been able to give my checker strong enough reasons as to why I can complete a task later. It’s not “my legs are tired”, or “it’s too hot” reasoning; it’s stronger. It’s usually birthed under the guise of prioritisation, especially when there are seemingly more productive courses of action to take.
There’s a lot that I do with my time, and there’s a lot of that that I could justify as productive. Still, it’s been frustrating to see some projects that I’ve conceptualised sit on the backlog for months without me noticing that I’ve endlessly procrastinated starting that project because my brain has consistently given me strong reasoning as to why I can do that later. It’s also unbelievably hard to spot when I do this because this “procrastination” could still be justified as productive!
I’m not sure how I can develop a smarter heuristic going forward. I know that I’ve already identified the issue, but I’m struggling to see what new markers I can now set to identify when I might be procrastinating heavily (even if my head is giving a strong rationale as to why). But there’s a part of me that thinks I really just need to accept that I’ll never be fully on top of everything that I want to do at any given time. There will always be tasks on the backlog, some for months on end. Hopefully, as I go through life, I get better at navigating through that and still doing the things I can immediately I can.
Whenever I procrastinate, the chances are that I've made a small promise to myself to do better. Whether it’s that I’m taking a longer nap than I need to or putting off sending an email I need to send or refusing to seize an opportunity to act on something, that action of procrastinating almost always comes right after a tiny promise I’ve made in my head that I’ll be better “next time”. These promises can also get super complex because I find that to get the “hardworking” part of my body to yield, a detailed explanation as to why more work is being put on the backlog must be given.
For a long time, the complexity of these plans served as a marker to identify when exactly it was okay to procrastinate. In my head, I would quickly run a check to see how much complexity was behind a reason (for procrastinating) for a certain task to decide whether it was okay to yield. If the rationale appeared too simple, I was incredibly likely to rebuff that attempt to procrastinate. Things like: “I’m too tired”, “the sun is too hot”, and “I can do this tomorrow” were unlikely to pass this check because the reasoning always felt too simple. They are always hard to overcome—because things like fatigue and weakness are backed by bodily responses—but they would set off red sirens because I was aware that these reasons were possibly “lazy” attempts to procrastinate.
But over the past few months, a lot of my procrastination has not come from instances where I’ve put off doing things because of the whim of the moment. I’m procrastinating less because of bodily impulses, but because I’ve been able to give my checker strong enough reasons as to why I can complete a task later. It’s not “my legs are tired”, or “it’s too hot” reasoning; it’s stronger. It’s usually birthed under the guise of prioritisation, especially when there are seemingly more productive courses of action to take.
There’s a lot that I do with my time, and there’s a lot of that that I could justify as productive. Still, it’s been frustrating to see some projects that I’ve conceptualised sit on the backlog for months without me noticing that I’ve endlessly procrastinated starting that project because my brain has consistently given me strong reasoning as to why I can do that later. It’s also unbelievably hard to spot when I do this because this “procrastination” could still be justified as productive!
I’m not sure how I can develop a smarter heuristic going forward. I know that I’ve already identified the issue, but I’m struggling to see what new markers I can now set to identify when I might be procrastinating heavily (even if my head is giving a strong rationale as to why). But there’s a part of me that thinks I really just need to accept that I’ll never be fully on top of everything that I want to do at any given time. There will always be tasks on the backlog, some for months on end. Hopefully, as I go through life, I get better at navigating through that and still doing the things I can immediately I can.