Yesterday I was talking with Juan Ignacio Martínez about procrastination.“(from Latin: pro, forward, and crastinus, referring to the future) or postponement, is the action or habit of putting off activities or situations that need to be addressed, replacing them with other, more irrelevant and pleasant ones.”
It is not easy to describe what happens to us when we are connected to the Internet all the time, but it could be defined as a “coitus interruptus of knowledge”: we never get to the root, either etymological or meaningful. It is a constant call of stimuli; we are interested, we go, we get tired, we find something else that catches our attention, we go in Z, in Y…
if it appeals to us visually, we continue; if it makes us distrustful, we leave. A word catches our attention and it has a link; we click. Basically, we devote ourselves to looking, assessing in microseconds, consuming, vomiting on Twitter and linking if applicable, and we keep looking for stimuli that, although superficial, excite us for brief moments.
This change in the way we read and acquire “knowledge” already has a name because it is already being studied, though not so much how it works as what effects it has on our minds.
Has it not happened to you that even in live, face-to-face interactions we already do the “20 seconds of listening, ok, not interesting” thing—change the channel or shift our gaze, like: you are boring me; I look away and then look again to see if it is more interesting now… like zapping with people, or speed listening.
On Wikipedia they describe it as a behavioural disorder rooted in associating the action to be carried out with change, pain, or discomfort (stress). This can be psychological (in the form of anxiety or frustration), physical (such as that experienced during acts that require hard work or vigorous exercise), or intellectual.
However, this affects our productivity: we are at work and it takes hours to finish a Word document or a PowerPoint because we have TweetDeck open, or we have YoNo alerts… that make us shift our gaze to something more interesting, and that is where the cycle starts again…
But what happens is that we then put off other tasks; it is hard for us to continue in a linear way, chronologically, and therefore in the end we leave things for another time. This creates mental clutter; as David Allen said in Getting Things Done, we start to increase our to-do list and we stress ourselves out for no reason.
The term procrastination is applied in the sense of anxiety generated by a task pending completion. The act being postponed may be perceived as overwhelming, challenging, unsettling, dangerous, difficult, tedious, or boring, that is, stressful, and so postponing it is self-justified to an idealised, indefinite future, in which what is important is subordinated to what is urgent”.
And then we fall into the loop of thinking: “how much work I have”, “I cannot keep up”, “I am flat out”… when what is happening is that we are not focusing.
Therefore, before we start, let us think and act. As Albert Einstein said, if I were given 10 hours to fell a tree with an axe, I would spend 9 sharpening it.
Therefore
1) let us make a list of the tasks we are going to do
2) let us mark them with 3 colours according to 5 factors (a–e)
a) emergency/urgency
b) important
c) I would like to do it today, but tomorrow would be just as fine
d) “it will take me less than 2 minutes”
e) “it will take me more than 2 minutes”
Then let us get to work, but without turning on TweetDeck or any other alerts, so that we stay focused; and when what is important and urgent is done—in that order—then we turn on whatever is needed.
Other interesting links
Procastring
The art of postponing
Microsiervos
Effective technology
ThinkWasabi