It might FEEL useful, but it's still procrastination!
BUSTED! (Can I still say that when it's me wot busted myself?! 🤔)
Yesterday I caught myself doing something that I suspect you might do too: Procrastinating by doing something that FEELS useful. But actually, isn't. (Not to be confused with procrastifaffing, which we all KNOW isn't useful 😉)
Here’s my audio confession. And a challenge for you, if you catch yourself doing this too!
(If you’d rather read than listen, and following captions isn’t your bag, scroll down for the full transcript)
Let me know in the comments if this feels familiar to you too. Hopefully you’ll feel a little better knowing that we ALL do it, even those of us who make our living from helping others get things done! 😉
Transcript
I just caught myself procrastinating, doing something that I know my clients sometimes do, and that maybe you do too. So I thought I'd share it with you here in the hope that it might help.
I just caught myself sitting with a Google Sheet that was designed to help me keep track of content ideas. It was shared with me earlier today, and it’s a really great template. But after sitting with it for a little while this afternoon, I thought, I wonder whether this might work better for me in Trello.
So I went over to Trello and I created a load of Trello boards. I started to play over there, getting the thing replicated. I'd been doing that for about 10 to 15 minutes before I realised,
“No, Louise, this is not a good use of your time. This is not going to be any better in Trello. The Google Sheet is perfectly fine.”
And what I realised was that I had retreated back to my happy place of organising stuff rather than actually doing the work, because doing the work felt uncomfortable.
The other thing I realised is that actually, I'm really tired. And the work I should have been doing, which was thinking about content ideas and how to fit them into this wonderful template, was proving a bit of a struggle, because I'm tired and it doesn't come naturally and easily to me.
I know that I need to be at my best, and I need to have some energy when I'm trying to do that kind of work.
So when I realised all of this, I knew that what I actually needed to do was not to faff about in Trello, but to take a break.
I’m sharing this with you in case that resonates, and is something you notice yourself doing too.
If you know you have a pattern to do this - you retreat to your happy place as a form of procrastination and it feels really useful at the time! – I invite you to see how quickly you can spot yourself doing it. Because the quicker you catch yourself, the sooner you can get yourself back on task and back into taking that meaningful action. Or taking a break, like I’m about to do now.