It’s an absolute pleasure and privilege to bring you this message today.
And it’s been a while, too!
Sometimes… sometimes one has not much to say. Been focusing on work and my health. And now… I’m letting Claude work on something that takes quite a while while I’m having some well-deserved iced coffee… listening to what I think is the honestly brilliant AI-slop category today (endless YouTube stuff like this).
And thinking about all the scandals around AI everything.
God, my AI fatigue is on otherworldly levels right now.
Did you follow what started the latest weeks-long panic about AI writing? The stuff about citation integrity? It all started after the recent Arxiv ruling/proposal on how all authors of a paper with hallucinated AI garbage in it, either in body text or references, would be banned from Arxiv for a time…
Well the world exploded with that, so much so that the Arxiv rep’s original post is now… like this:
You can still read about it here though.
So let’s do the world a favour and not talk about AI today.
And let’s talk about a real fun activity: procrastination!
Because you do you procrastinate. I know. I procrastinate too. Don’t we just all do that every now and then, really. Today we’ll hammer some sense into that situation.
For procrastination is 1) natural and OK, and 2) a great opportunity to understand more about yourself and your work.
One day a week-ish ago, after dropping my daughter to the daycare, and during my morning walk, I was listening to a cool book “Who not How” by Dan Sullivan & Benjamin Hardy. One thought struck me hard enough for me to stop at a nearby StarBucks to write down some notes on the way back to stare at this same shiny rectangle I’m staring again right now.
For some background, the duo Sullivan & Hardy is one of the better partnerships out there. Sullivan grows businesses for living, by observing and coaching ultra-successful entrepreneurs. And Dr. Hardy has the academic background to put all the neat frameworks into a nicely packaged scientific frame.
But. Procrastination. Let us stay on topic now.
I’ll deliver today’s ceremony in two short parts. First we’ll touch a bit on what procrastination means for academics like us, and then we’ll jump straight to what the Sullivan-Hardy framing adds on the table.
Wanna dive in?
PSA: I’ve got a new info-webinar out about PhD Power Trio: https://webinars.edgeacademia.com/w/phd-power-trio — check it out! I just had to vibe code myself a webinar platform, after seeing someone selling a (worse one) for… $79 dollars a month. Ha.
The Procrastinating Academic
Let me start today with some aspirational but solid wisdom.
Your work life consists of your work weeks. That’s really the intuitive atomic unit for most: usually a conference lasts a week, you can easily think of what you have to get done this week, etc. A week starts and week ends. Months tend to already get already blurrier, they don’t “start” really in terms of your plans usually. So it’s the week. And those weeks are built by your days. Your days are built on your hours, and your hours are simply moments put together in a long line, like dominoes.
And you’d better at some point learn to make sense of those moments, and how they link, to make those days and weeks better.
Because when you spiral into procrastination during the wrong moment, it’s always just harder and harder to dig yourself out from that hole.
And when it starts to hurt too much, guess what happens?
You kind of panic. And resort to pseudo-work. Just do something, anything! To get that sweet feeling of “at least working.” Do pointless work that’s always there in abundance, but leads to nowhere. Scroll emails. Open a paper and tweak words for 2 hours without real progress.
And then at the end of the day we get to lie to ourselves that hey I worked for 2 hours.
But hours are not results. Results are results.
(The deep philosopher Simo strikes again)
What has happened is we’ve all been told procrastination is evil. You’re supposed to be constantly doing something, or you’re wasting taxpayer money!
Meh, wrong.
What you’re supposed to do is catch yourself when you procrastinate, and figure out what’s really happening.
The paradox here is that the days we fill our days with pseudo-work just to not procrastinate are the most painful days.
A day filled with wrong type of work is a day more wasted than one with just 2 hours of work that leads in results. Catching yourself is key.
Simply noticing your procrastination IS the first intervention.
Just see it.
Then sit with it for a while, and choose carefully. Sure, you could resort to pointless work (which, I guarantee you, won’t help you in the long run) or start a new “exciting” side project (which, I guarantee you, will just fill your future you’s calendar with more pointless work).
I’ve lost the count how many times I’ve had to confess to myself “this is insane” after starting “yet another paper” in a world where we are already drowning in papers. The value of “a paper” is rapidly approaching zero.
And that doesn’t even account for the future cost. You’ll have to finish the paper, or deal with unfinished work, and your brain has a tendency to just get cluttered with all unfinished work (the Zeikarnik Effect).
So. Let’s start with just catching it. Then we name what we’re actually dealing with and act on it. But all of it depends on one thing: knowing what you should be doing.
Now hold that thought for a second. We’ll come back to it.
Procrastination as Wisdom
As cliche as it sounds, you can learn from almost anything if you just pause and stop. We just don’t usually.
Procrastination is one of the most powerful teachers of self-awareness in life. Think about it. You have a job to do. A job you know you should do, and in most cases you even lie to yourself it’s something you genuinely want to do.
But you just won’t do it. A slightly more accurate version is you just can’t get yourself to start.
How juicy of an opportunity is that to untangle our messy brain a bit?
To get some help for this, at this point we now turn back to Hardy and Sullivan. Their take on procrastination is roughly as follows:
- Procrastination as Wisdom: Procrastination is a great guide if you just first catch it. It’s a clear sign that the task you’re supposed to do requires you to do something that’s “too much” now, often meaning you’d have to grow in some aspect. And growing is painful.
- The “How” Trap: You end up asking “How” can you possibly get this done, in the short time you have and as well as you have to do it! Panic! The curveball here is “how” limits you to YOUR current skills, time and energy. All of which, by the way, are limited. When the “how” is too much, you just don’t get started and you procrastinate.
- The “Who” Solution: Shifting your focus to “Who can help me get this done?” bypasses the obstacle.
Now, the book if for (rich) entrepreneurs so you can fill in the rest of the third bullet: “just hire help.”
Heh. Doesn’t quite work like that for us. So, in our case, what do we do?
We borrow the spirit, and boldly simply ignore the recipe. That’s how you read self-helpy books anyway.
(By the way I just love when people whine how books don’t help. Yeah, a book alone won’t help. Its lessons, applied, with your twist, will help)
Because before you can find your “who” you must know “what” and “why” you’re avoiding. And procrastination, it turns out, comes in three flavours. So when you do next time catch it, the right move is to stop long enough to taste which one are we dealing with this time:
- Wrong task. Some thing that shouldn’t exist at all. Yet another paper nobody needs. Kill it.
- Wrong person. The work and task are real. Needs doing. But can’t be you. You either will do it poorly, or it’s the task of some co-author who is supposed to be helping you anyway. Don’t be the solo superhero always. Besides, allowing others to help, is a favour to them. It’s not a burden. Ask for help.
- Wrong size. The work is yours to own, no question about it. But the “how” is just so enormous you brain refuses to start. Here the “who” is then logically the future you. And your simple job is to hand over to your future you a started version. One bad sentence. The first domino.
Mid-panic, all three will feel the same though.
So you reach for the easiest thing on the desk and call it work. Just to be angry at yourself later in the afternoon for having done work that doesn’t matter at all.
You can’t do the sorting if you don’t know what you should be doing in the first place. Kill the wrong task? You have to know it’s wrong. Hand the real one to a “who”? You have to know it’s real and it matters.
So underneath all these is knowing what to do. And the tricky part is your todo-list really usually doesn’t tell that. Crossing out ten things that don’t matter… is work that doesn’t matter.
So find out what’s your current important but not urgent category of work (just take a look at the past week with our own Power Audit).
It will teach you about the work you should be doing, as you just intuitively know. But you have to give it some focused time.