Another great article by Paul Graham this time about good and bad procrastination. He brakes procrastination down to 3 types: we procrastinate to do nothing, something less important or and here’s the big OR, something more important. The upshot of the article is that procrastination is a good thing if we put off doing less important things and instead focus on more important things.
That’s the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all
procrastinators. They’re type-C procrastinators: they put off
working on small stuff to work on big stuff.What’s "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being
mentioned in your obituary. It’s hard to say at the time what will
turn out to be your best work (will it be your magnum opus on
Sumerian temple architecture, or the detective thriller you wrote
under a pseudonym?), but there’s a whole class of tasks you can
safely rule out: shaving, doing your laundry, cleaning the house,
writing thank-you notes– anything that might be called an errand.Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work…
The reason it pays to put off even those errands is that real work
needs two things errands don’t: big chunks of time, and the
right mood. If you get inspired by some project, it can be a net
win to blow off everything you were supposed to do for the next few
days to work on it. Yes, those errands may cost you more time when
you finally get around to them. But if you get a lot done during
those few days, you will be net more productive.
Most
of us end up doing the exact opposite. We allow put off doing the big
important things by doing errands and tasks. My dad always refers to
this as going to the post office. You put off doing that important
thing because you have to go to the post office to check the mail.
Errands are so effective at killing great projects that a lot of
people use them for that purpose. Someone who has decided to write
a novel, for example, will suddenly find that the house needs
cleaning. People who fail to write novels don’t do it by sitting
in front of a blank page for days without writing anything. They
do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need for
their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email. "I
don’t have time to work," they say. And they don’t; they’ve made
sure of that.
He
offers some suggestions to help keep the mundane from stopping you from
doing the great. One of them is to ask yourself these questions:
- What are the most important problems in your field?
- Are you working on one of them?
- Why not?
Go read the whole article and inspire yourself to focus on what is important and what will bring you to greatness. Good And Band Procrastination