December 2005The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators.So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad?Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cureit. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are aninfinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what youwork on, you're not working on everything else. So the questionis not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what youdo instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing,(b) something less important, or (c) something more important. Thatlast type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.That's the "absent-minded professor," who forgets to shave, or eat,or even perhaps look where he's going while he's thinking aboutsome interesting question. His mind is absent from the everydayworld because it's hard at work in another.That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are allprocrastinators. They're type-C procrastinators: they put offworking on small stuff to work on big stuff.What's "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of beingmentioned in your obituary. It's hard to say at the time what willturn out to be your best work (will it be your magnum opus onSumerian temple architecture, or the detective thriller you wroteunder a pseudonym?), but there's a whole class of tasks you cansafely rule out: shaving, doing your laundry, cleaning the house,writing thank-you notes—anything that might be called an errand.Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.Good in a sense, at least. The people who want you to do the errandswon't think it's good. But you probably have to annoy them if youwant to get anything done. The mildest seeming people, if theywant to do real work, all have a certain degree of ruthlessnesswhen it comes to avoiding errands.Some errands, like replying to letters, go away if youignore them (perhaps taking friends with them). Others, like mowingthe lawn, or filing tax returns, only get worse if you put themoff. In principle it shouldn't work to put off the second kind oferrand. You're going to have to do whatever it is eventually. Whynot (as past-due notices are always saying) do it now?The reason it pays to put off even those errands is that real workneeds two things errands don't: big chunks of time, and theright mood. If you get inspired by some project, it can be a netwin to blow off everything you were supposed to do for the next fewdays to work on it. Yes, those errands may cost you more time whenyou finally get around to them. But if you get a lot done duringthose few days, you will be net more productive.In fact, it may not be a difference in degree, but a difference inkind. There may be types of work that can only be done in long,uninterrupted stretches, when inspiration hits, rather than dutifullyin scheduled little slices. Empirically it seems to be so. WhenI think of the people I know who've done great things, I don'timagine them dutifully crossing items off to-do lists. I imaginethem sneaking off to work on some new idea.Conversely, forcing someone to perform errands synchronously isbound to limit their productivity. The cost of an interruption isnot just the time it takes, but that it breaks the time on eitherside in half. You probably only have to interrupt someone a coupletimes a day before they're unable to work on hard problems at all.I've wondered a lot about why startups are most productive at thevery beginning, when they're just a couple guys in an apartment.The main reason may be that there's no one to interrupt them yet.In theory it's good when the founders finally get enough money tohire people to do some of the work for them. But it may be betterto be overworked than interrupted. Once you dilute a startup withordinary office workers—with type-B procrastinators—the wholecompany starts to resonate at their frequency. They're interrupt-driven,and soon you are too.Errands are so effective at killing great projects that a lot ofpeople use them for that purpose. Someone who has decided to writea novel, for example, will suddenly find that the house needscleaning. People who fail to write novels don't do it by sittingin front of a blank page for days without writing anything. Theydo it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need fortheir apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email. "Idon't have time to work," they say. And they don't; they've madesure of that.(There's also a variant where one has no place to work. The cureis to visit the places where famous people worked, and see howunsuitable they were.)I've used both these excuses at one time or another. I've learneda lot of tricks for making myself work over the last 20 years, buteven now I don't win consistently. Some days I get real work done.Other days are eaten up by errands. And I know it's usually myfault: I let errands eat up the day, to avoidfacing some hard problem.The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-Bprocrastination, because it doesn't feel like procrastination.You're "getting things done." Just the wrong things.Any advice about procrastination that concentrates on crossingthings off your to-do list is not only incomplete, but positivelymisleading, if it doesn't consider the possibility that the to-dolist is itself a form of type-B procrastination. In fact, possibilityis too weak a word. Nearly everyone's is. Unless you're workingon the biggest things you could be working on, you're type-Bprocrastinating, no matter how much you're getting done.In his famous essay You and Your Research (which I recommend toanyone ambitious, no matter what they're working on), Richard Hammingsuggests that you ask yourself three questions: What are the most important problems in your field? Are you working on one of them? Why not?Hamming was at Bell Labs when he started asking such questions. Inprinciple anyone there ought to have been able to work on the mostimportant problems in their field. Perhaps not everyone can makean equally dramatic mark on the world; I don't know; but whateveryour capacities, there are projects that stretch them. So Hamming'sexercise can be generalized to: What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?Most people will shy away from this question. I shy away from itmyself; I see it there on the page and quickly move on to the nextsentence. Hamming used to go around actually asking people this,and it didn't make him popular. But it's a question anyone ambitiousshould face.The trouble is, you may end up hooking a very big fish with thisbait. To do good work, you need to do more than find good projects.Once you've found them, you have to get yourself to work on them,and that can be hard. The bigger the problem, the harder it is toget yourself to work on it.Of course, the main reason people find it difficult to work on aparticular problem is that they don't enjoy it. When you're young,especially, you often find yourself working on stuff you don'treally like-- because it seems impressive, for example, or becauseyou've been assigned to work on it. Most grad students are stuckworking on big problems they don't really like, and grad school isthus synonymous with procrastination.But even when you like what you're working on, it's easier to getyourself to work on small problems than big ones. Why? Why is itso hard to work on big problems? One reason is that you may notget any reward in the forseeable future. If you work on somethingyou can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feelingof accomplishment fairly soon. If the reward is indefinitely farin the future, it seems less real.Another reason people don't work on big projects is, ironically,fear of wasting time. What if they fail? Then all the time theyspent on it will be wasted. (In fact it probably won't be, becausework on hard projects almost always leads somewhere.)But the trouble with big problems can't be just that they promiseno immediate reward and might cause you to waste a lot of time. Ifthat were all, they'd be no worse than going to visit your in-laws.There's more to it than that. Big problems are terrifying.There's an almost physical pain in facing them. It's like havinga vacuum cleaner hooked up to your imagination. All your initialideas get sucked out immediately, and you don't have any more, andyet the vacuum cleaner is still sucking.You can't look a big problem too directly in the eye. You have toapproach it somewhat obliquely. But you have to adjust the anglejust right: you have to be facing the big problem directly enoughthat you catch some of the excitement radiating from it, but notso much that it paralyzes you. You can tighten the angle once youget going, just as a sailboat can sail closer to the wind once itgets underway.If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourselfinto doing it. You have to work on small things that could growinto big things, or work on successively larger things, or splitthe moral load with collaborators. It's not a sign of weakness todepend on such tricks. The very best work has been done this way.When I talk to people who've managed to make themselves work on bigthings, I find that all blow off errands, and all feel guilty aboutit. I don't think they should feel guilty. There's more to dothan anyone could. So someone doing the best work they can isinevitably going to leave a lot of errands undone. It seems amistake to feel bad about that.I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to letdelight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you. Work onan ambitious project you really enjoy, and sail as close to thewind as you can, and you'll leave the right things undone.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and RobertMorris for reading drafts of this.
