At the start of this month, I posted that I was working on a novel. By way of motivating myself to actually work on the novel, I wrote that I would be posting drafts here. So far, I’ve done this once. What’s stopped me doing it again? I’ve been working on the novel, after all. The answer, I think, is productive procrastination.
I’ve never considered myself a productive person; I’ve written at length about how a lot of this is due to until-recently-undiagnosed ADHD (see here and here). As a result, I became desperate to learn how to be productive; after all, it seemed to come so naturally to others! I was therefore delighted to discover that there was a sizeable productivity culture on YouTube. I watched a lot of videos. I discovered apps, workflows, hacks, books, methods, mindsets, buzzwords, courses. I thought I was becoming more productive. I learned some things that have helped me be a bit better organised that I use to this day, but by and large it made me miserable. I spent too much time worrying that I was doing things wrong, which meant I wasn’t spending time doing the thing, as I explained in my last post. See, these people all have something to sell; it’s in their best interests to keep you hooked, looking for the next thing that promises to 10x productivity.1 But none of this stuff really matters. Most of it is masturbatory. Most of it pantomimic. This is productive procrastination: tweaking, optimising, planning are all ways to make you feel like and look like you’re doing work, but you’re doing anything but.
Tapping aimlessly at YouTube today, I stumbled across this video from Sam Matla:
Being an absolute sucker for anything remotely resembling productivity clickbait, I clicked. But Matla wasn’t spouting familiar ‘productivity’ rhetoric. He spoke about how many people who want to get things done don’t, usually due to overthinking. He had two solutions:
Experiment.
Finish.
I’ve realised recently that I (and many others) tend to immediately overcomplicate things (again, see last post), so this appealed. By experiment, Matla means that one shouldn’t worry about how ‘good’, ‘useful’ or anything like that something is — instead, one should take the opportunity to experiment. Experimentation is a state of creative openness that’s the antithesis of perfectionism (which is just another form of procrastination) where you try something to see if it works. Whether it does or not doesn’t matter, because either way you practise, either way you get better, and either way, you actually do some work.
So, in regard to my novel: I’ve been spending time ‘planning’, ‘researching’ and ‘thinking’. I’m going to have to stop all of that, and figure it out while actually doing some work. It’s going to be difficult, but I mention it here in the hope that someone will call me out if I now do not post anything from my novel. Because that’s what I plan to do. Post the experiments. The mess. The scraps. The work.2
In my opinion, one of the worst culprits is the Keep Productive YouTube channel. Likeable Brit everyman Francesco is ostensibly helping people find the right productivity app for them, but in reality he’s just encouraging people to hop around and pretend to be productive.
Going meta, yes I suppose you could argue that this post itself is also a form of productive procrastination. You’ve caught me.