Procrastination can be productive

A few years ago, I terminated the lease for the flat I was living in at that time. I was miserable, and knew I had to get out of there. But then, I waited for almost two months to start looking for a new place to stay. In this instance, I got lucky. Because I was so desperate to find something, I replied to listings that I usually wouldn't have replied to. One of them was more expensive and had worse pictures than most other rooms I looked at. I probably wasn't the only one who wouldn't normally reply to this listing, because there wasn't much competition around this place. And so I found a place to stay three days before I needed to move out of my previous flat, with a wonderful flatmate I'm still friends with. But this wasn't the only time I put things off until last minute. And most of the time, I was less lucky. I'll never know what great things I missed because I didn't get my shit together.

I used to think of procrastination as something bad. It can cause stressful moments. It can cause you to miss opportunities. It can make you miserable. I know that, because all that happened to me. Because of that, for a long time, whenever I was putting off something, I beat myself up for it. The only effect this had was that I started to hate myself. It didn't solve my tendency to procrastinate. If anything, it made it worse. It took me a long time to figure out how to deal with it.

I'm not writing this post from a place of having beat procrastination to now hand down some hard-earned wisdom or, even better, sell you some stupid course to beat it yourself. In fact, last weekend were two of the my most procrastination-intensive days in recent years. During this, I realised how much my attitude towards procrastination changed since then. What I procrastinated on will sound familiar. Last week, I terminated my lease. Once again, I now have less than three months to find a new place to live. But instead of starting to look for a flat, I spend the whole weekend working on a side project and restructuring the code I've written for this blog. This isn't to say that this work wasn't worth doing. Especially the code restructuring was long overdue. But was it really the most important thing to do?

The first step to deal with procrastination is to understand it. Instead of feeling guilty about not doing the things you think you should do, simply be curious about why you are not doing them. What is holding you back? Procrastination is a self-protection mechanism. At its basis, you will often find a fear. To deal with your procrastination, you have to deal with this fear. The reason beating yourself up doesn't work because it doesn't acknowledge the fear. But fear is something natural. Sometimes it is even justified. The best way I have learned to deal with my fears is to define them as specific as possible. How likely it is that they will actually occur? What will their impact be? And how can you I prepare to lessen or completely avoid their impact in case they occur?

Defining your fear takes time and attention. Sometimes just looking at them directly will make them fade away. Most often, however, they will still be scary. But because you now know more clearly what to overcome, you can break it down into steps that will feel manageable. One helpful question I learned is: What is the biggest change you're actually willing to make? Be honest about it. Bringing it back to the last weekend, I don't feel bad about it. Because I asked this exact question. And I just wasn't ready to look for a flat. I had been thinking about my hobby project for at least a year, and had finally started working on it just a few weeks earlier. I had also set a clear deadline for the week after, and wanted to finish it up before that. And in the big scheme of things, this one week of looking for a flat won't make that much of a difference ¹. So I got to work and spend a super productive weekend finalising said project. And I would do it just like this again. Even if a younger me might have hated how much I procrastinated. But probably, he would be impressed that I didn't just procrastinate by smoking weed and playing video games.

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