As I work toward becoming more productive (tomorrow will be a review of Charles Duhigg‘s new book), I find myself doing something rather puzzling: I’m all set to get on with a task or goal, heading straight for it, and then I think, ‘Oh, before I get started I’ll just . . . ‘ and before you know it the momentum has stalled. 45 minutes have passed since I was supposedly going to get started.
1. The habit of procrastination.
Even when I really do want to do whatever it is, I’m so used to putting things off that it just feels weird to plunge in. It’s almost as if I think, ‘Am I really going to do this? There must be something else I can do first.’ Sometimes I call this act “taking a little break.” In her work on loopholes, Gretchen Rubin calls this type of thinking “the apparently irrelevant decision.” It doesn’t seem as if that one little misstep could cost me part of a morning, but that’s exactly what has happened, numerous times.
2. The presence of distractions.
Jean Kerr, a prolific playwright, had this to say in her classic Please Don’t Eat the Daisies:
Out in the car, where I freeze to death or roast to death depending on the season, all is serene. The few things there are to read in the front-seat area (Chevrolet, E-gasoline-F, ioo-temp-20o) I have long since committed to memory. So there is nothing to do but write, after I have the glove compartment tidied up.
(You haven’t read this classic? Get a free download by following the link above.) Many productive people safeguard against distractions by going somewhere inaccessible. Some place without WiFi, for instance. Oh, wait. There is no such place.
3. The law of inertia.
A body at rest tends to stay at rest. But once put in motion, a body will keep going (minus the effects of friction, or course). So it’s often helpful for me to tell myself, ‘Just do five minutes and then you can quit.’ I have to be careful, though, and actually do whatever it is. A body in motion can be detailed. Maybe I should repeat to myself the deathless phrase from Star Wars: “Stay on target! Stay on target!”
Well, having allowed myself the distraction of looking up Jean Kerr’s book, reading the introduction, and then reading her Wikipedia entry and a description of one of her plays, I guess I’d better end this post. That sort of web browsing constitutes one of my biggest roadblocks–‘Oh, I’ll just look this up real quick.’ No, no, no. On, on, on.