What we don’t understand about “productivity vs procrastination”
By: Udit Sathe
Tags: Success, Habits, Procrastination, Self Help, Productivity

If you have been anywhere near exams, projects or assignments or any sort of creative work you don’t need to be told what productivity and procrastination mean. What we all want to do at the end of the day is to be better at whatever it is that we do, whether it is studying, working or creating content. Coming out of months long writer’s block I have noticed one thing, that I wasn’t really going through a writer’s block, and not all the writers who claim to be are actually going through one. The fact of the matter is, like many other times I was once again in a cycle of procrastination. Following are the points, why we procrastinate, what we don’t know about it, what is missing in our productivity or at least, the idea of it, and how to make productivity win this match up.

1. Why do I want one more episode and how do I let it be?

Reasons can be various. Mainly, the simplest thing is that you like the shows you watch more than the work you need to do. Now, I know that school isn’t all that fun and homework, definitely not. But here’s the kicker, how often do we notice for how long are we procrastinating and for how many days, weeks or months (RED FLAG) have we been creating this habit of kicking back and doing something that just doesn’t matter?

Once you notice these subtle things everyday you can imagine yourself beating this habit, because just a habit is what it is.

Step two: we need to change our outlook on what self discipline is, thanks to the poets who have glorified pain we think of discipline as something that is painful yet necessary for success at something. Now imagine, if at the beginning of something new you started for making yourself better rather than to get one more star up your collar. Would it make you more willing to do the work it demands? Yes. Now, what little approach did we take here rather than the one that describes self discipline as a painful achievement?

We just swapped the motive from getting better to ace in the environment we exist, to getting better because we want to, which means, out of self love.

Step three: Now that you know that discipline is a projection of self love, your choices will change. You automatically will choose to do the things that you feel passionate about; this step is the one that you will not be able to take if you don’t value self love. Now you can be busy as hell but you will find time for doing what it is that you have chosen to do, and this very act of the need to find time for what you love will make you use your time wisely and hence, more productively.

2. How we misinterpret productivity

It is high time that we stop thinking of productivity as execution. An approach towards productivity that we often ignore is that, it is not simply the amount of work you do, but the amount of honest work. So, copying assignments and completing them just for the sake of it (guilty), isn’t really productivity, you are producing results but not improving yourself. So, in a time of say, ten years if you don’t know a formula for trigonometric use because you copied that particular assignment, you didn’t really do any productive work, did you? So thinking in this way many of you would come to the conclusion that if the work does not have your personal involvement or in creative fields, your own ideas it isn’t really productivity.

Productivity is execution fueled by originality.

3. And Productivity For the win…

Now for the ones wounded in the war, comfortably devouring creative content of others and choking their own potential. Let’s help these procrastinators get up and running, and more and more productive. Thanks to Mr. Charles Duhigg for writing the book “The Power Of Habit”, it is because of this book I have come to know what I like to call “The Holy Cycle Of Habits” described below in pixels.

Cue in the picture above is the trigger that makes you do something, now if you are reading this article you receive two cues, one to procrastinate by doing the various things that you do, well, to procrastinate, and the other is to execute what you have been putting down and procrastinating. What the reward for procrastinating is depends on the activity, but in most cases it usually rounds up to instant gratification (which isn’t really worth the rewards of productive work) where as the reward for being productive is maybe, good grades, better creative input in future, more content, better fitness levels, being recognized or whatever it is that doing the work will bring you.

Now, very often we know the rewards as well as their importance and we get the cues as well but we don’t execute because the task looks too daunting or too boring. What we need to achieve in such cases is what psychologists call FLOW.

It is in easy words, the sweet spot where the difficulty of the task matches with your skill level (better explained by the graph).

Once you achieve this you will notice that you can be productive and procrastinate less pretty easily. But how do we achieve it.

You need to do that by removing the blocks of time from your procrastination schedule when you panic of doing the put down task and actually do it.

Keep removing this block every day and do just the amount of the work or should I say level of work that keeps you on the edge of your seat. As you get comfortable and it seems easy remove another block of time and try to do more but keep it just at the border of your skill set or in this case your capacity to do work.

4. Procrastination throws a wild card

Maybe, just maybe and i feel guilty for writing this, the thing you are procrastinating on can be something that can contribute to your growth. I’ll just add another maybe here, to explain you the scale of how rarely this happens. But such circumstances you can only make a decision if you are self aware and moreover, comparison plays a really important role here. There arises a need to compare the rewards of both sides but the process needs to be honest and not trickery on your own mind.