Productive Procrastination

For The Exclusive,

Fatima Zakariya Mahamood

@fatima.z20

We've all fallen prey to the vicious claws of procrastination every once in a while. Pushing back tasks just for that little extra bit of ‘me time’ or just a few more hours of glorious freedom. Procrastination is a plaque that spreads far and wide.

But what about productive procrastination? The glimmering ray of hope that makes us feel not all that useless. During those bleak gray times when we feel uninspired to do our immediate tasks, productive procrastination helps us stay occupied while also refreshing our minds to equip us to accomplish our main tasks. Performing activities like cleaning or cooking can fire up the creative centers in our brains and we can approach our primary tasks with a whole new perspective. It gives our brains a much needed dopamine hit and rewires it to handle the daunting task it had been avoiding in the first place.

So is productive procrastination the cure we've been searching for all along? The guardian angel that breaks down the maleficent chains of idle procrastination? 

To me it just doesn't sit right. Maybe it's the fact that the word ‘procrastination’ still tags along, but that is something to be considered. For those looking at it with rose-tinted glasses, it may seem as though we're getting a lot done while ultimately heading back to the task at hand. But there lies the catch. Productive procrastination only works if we eventually crawl back to our most important primary task.

For most people, the feeling of accomplishing smaller feats tends to cloud the senses and

instead of returning to what they had been avoiding in the first place, they go searching for more minor tasks that they can work on and in this process the ultimate goal gets lost somewhere along the way. In the constant hunt for side quests to gain brownie points, the main mission is forgotten. In the attempt to push back certain work, more work gets added on to the plate, and before you know it, you've bitten off more than you can chew. And so, it ends up as a vicious cycle where in the quest to avoid some work, more and more work gets added which again ends up getting neglected after some time.

Therefore, in reality productive procrastination poses as a trojan horse of some sort. It gives us a false sense of security that we have accomplished something, when the fact remains that what had to be accomplished was something else altogether. It begins to work against time management as we spend the majority of our time and effort on trivial tasks, which could otherwise have been completed with minimum effort.    

So while productive procrastination has its benefits, in the long run it has the same ill fated consequences as idle procrastination, if not worse. So next time there's some work looming over my shoulders, instead of pushing my luck, I’d rather pull my weight and get it over with when it has to be done.