What You Think is Progress Might be Procrastination
We use procrastination to avoid something we don’t want to do. Typically, we think of procrastination as doing nothing instead of the task that will make progress. While writing Do It Now, I identified two forms of procrastination that involve doing something that does make progress…but not progress toward the goal. These forms of procrastination put effort “toward our goal”, or within the same domain as our goal, and thus “excuse us” from working on the difficult tasks that will actually achieve our goal.
In this fourth article, we’ll explore why and how we justify these procrastination methods using the example of selling a beloved, used, NA (first gen) Mazda Miata in a seller’s market, where buyers are willing to purchase practically anything that rolls.
(The NA Mazda Miata example is completely random…zero personal connection)
Procrastination Type 1: Processing Unnecessary Tasks
The first of these two forms of procrastination is staging unnecessary tasks (fixing the beloved Miata) as prerequisites to the ultimate goal (selling the beloved Miata). Imagine, hypothetically, the car being sold got in an accident where the rear quarter panel got absolutely demolished and looked… unwell. “The car will never sell with that sort of damage” the owner convinces themselves, and thus establishes fixing the damage as a prerequisite to selling the vehicle.
However, if the seller used critical thinking, they would have realized, in a sellers market where buyers buy anything that rolls, the fix is entirely unnecessary. Fixing the damage would make little-to-no difference in the sale price considering the market; the make, model, generation, reconstructed title of the car; and cost of repair in time and money.
The owner doesn’t critically think though. They fix the damage. It satisfies their feeling of wanting to work toward the goal of selling the car but it makes no progress in that direction. It lets them delay doing the hard work of actually selling the car. The hard work of getting an ad up, responding to people, changing over the title; of emotionally letting go of your first car; of logistics without another car lined up. It’s hard. But there is no other way to achieve your goals than to complete all the required tasks regardless of their difficulty.
Fixing that quarter panel did not sell the car. Selling the car sold the car. The “necessary fix”, that delayed the goal, was undone by the buyer in the end.
Procrastination Type 2: Over-processing Necessary Tasks
Possibly more “justifiable”, but equally as wasteful, is the second form of procrastination which is over-processing necessary tasks (cleaning the beloved Miata). The unwritten rulebook of used car selling silently states that cleaning a car to a sufficient level before title transfer is a courtesy that shows respect for the car and well wishes for the new owner. Cleaning the Miata is a legitimate effort toward a necessary task enabling the ideal car selling experience. How well does that legitimate effort need to be executed? To the extent defined by the requirement written by the critical thinking process.
To find that requirement, ask:
- Does the Miata need to look brand new? No.
- Does it need to smell brand new? No.
- Does it need to feel, sound, or taste brand new? …n…no? No. 😶.
“Brand-new” is not a requirement to achieve the ultimate goal of selling the car. We know this through the critical thinking process, and through this same process, we determine (arbitrarily for this example) a required Cleaning Quality of 5 to sell the car. Let’s use the graph below to visualize this Cleaning Quality level.
Cleaning Quality v Time
- The axis of the graph:
- x= Time (minutes of effort)
- y= Cleaning Quality
- Blue Line: Minimum Cleaning Quality Level
- Green Line: Diminishing Returns on Time investment
- Red Dots: Ordered pairs of Time spent achieving Cleaning Quality
Since we are using a resource (time) to clean the Miata, we will look to minimize the consumption of this resource. To achieve the minimum Cleaning Quality of 5, we need to clean for 10 minutes.
Procrastination occurs precisely when we cross from necessary to unnecessary which happens to be any point on the green curve above the blue line. It is procrastination because we are working on something that is already complete. The requirement has been met.
Procrastination of this form is not always deliberate. It happens when we don’t have a plan developed through critical thinking or when we’re convinced we’re perfectionists. When we are operating with the Employee Mindset, we succumb to tunnel vision for the task at hand, losing grip of its requirements (if they were defined) and relevancy with respect to the ultimate goal. We justify overindulgence by convincing ourselves we’re “working toward the ultimate goal”. Meanwhile, we conveniently dismiss that the value of the resources spent making a used-car unnecessarily clean far out-weight the returns realized when the car is sold.
Solution
Read Think Critically To Achieve Your Goals
tl;dr:
- Avoid either form of procrastination by critically evaluating the tasks necessary to achieve the goal
- Avoid Processing Unnecessary Tasks by critically thinking to determine if the task is necessary at all
- Avoid Over-processing Necessary Tasks by establishing requirements through critical thinking for the goal and all tasks
- Progress is only made when effort is applied in the right direction
This article is 4 of 4
