Sound Writing

Procrastination is especially easy when there’s an easily accessible distraction we can use to put off work. Some of the most common distractions are social media, imageboard websites, phone or computer games, TV, and socializing. Sometimes, though, the tasks we perform to procrastinate seem important, and this is called productive procrastination. Symptoms of productive procrastination include cleaning, doing less-intimidating homework, sending emails, or otherwise taking care of day-to-day tasks that are important but that are clearly not urgent. One way of assessing whether you’re allocating your time well is to use a the flowchart below. If there’s anything on your plate that falls into the top box, do that first. The hard part to remember is to do the middle box after that. The categorization into urgent and not urgent is useful, but the nature of time means that anything that’s important and not urgent will soon be both important and urgent! Not procrastinating means taking care of stuff in the middle box whenever you can, especially before it moves into the top box. Thinking in terms of both importance and urgency is a good way to stay out of the trap of feeling productive by doing less important or less urgent work.