As Pandora found when she was messing around with her box, sometimes you start things, they gain momentum and then woosh, they are beyond your control!

My Pandora’s box moment came after reading The Four Hour Work Week (affiliate link).

Now, many people better qualified than me can tell you about the ins-and-outs of the book, talk you through the more subtle points. Instead, what has stayed with me from the book, what I was amazed by, was how ready it was to take on the assumptions that underlie how we approach work today, and how easily it was able to show many of them to be outdated and irrelevant.

It is this challenging and questioning approach that has infected my thinking. This is the ‘Pandora-process’ that I can’t seen to control or stop. And I’m pleased about it.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

What’s wrong with earning a living?

Earning a living. Simple enough phrase really. 99.9% of the world’s working population go to work everyday and ‘earn a living’. But take a second to think about what the words really mean: Earn. A. Living.

What does the phrase say? More importantly, what is the underlying assumption it makes about work and life? If you think about it, you can see that the phrase implies that you have ‘do’ one thing (earn), in order to ‘have’ another (living). It implies that you have to work, before you are allowed to thrive; that you have to ‘earn’ before you can ‘live’.

Even if it is just a figure a speech (and even if it is, we mustn’t forget that the way we talk about things dramatically impacts our approach to them) I don’t like this assumption that we have to ‘earn a living’, for a number of reasons. Most of my reasons are focused on what it seems to imply about the deferring of one’s life to a later date in lieu of earning now. Life is NOW, not in the future, at some unspecified date. But I won’t go into that now. For the moment I’ll just ask:

What about earning WHILE living instead?

What about you?

Have you experienced a change to your thinking or approach to life?
What spurred that change?
What examples do you have of flawed thinking and bogus assumptions in our everyday approach to work and life?

Today I’ve had to draw a line.

I’ve drawn a line under a highly productive behaviour that’s been helping me get some useful things done. Why would I do this? The answer is because I have fallen into a nasty behaviour-trap I’m going to call ‘productive’ procrastination.

Getting loads done whilst getting nothing done

It is 15 days since I launched this blog. In that time I have added just two posts to the site (1,2). Now, I recognise that, in general, my output is going to be low. I am writing in my spare time around work, so time is limited. But I still feel that just two posts is really poor. To rub salt into the wound, I have been spending every spare-time minute ‘working’ on the blog. So, given I’ve been putting the effort in, what has been preventing me from writing more content? Well, to be honest, I have.

Thinking back over it now I can see that each time I’ve sat down to work on the blog, I’ve put up little ‘to-do-list’ barriers that have prevented me from actually concentrating on producing good content. I would convince myself there were lots of ‘things’ that needed to ‘get done’ before I could happily concentrate on articles and posts. Whether it was changing the column layout, tweaking my header design or adding a contact page I’ve found all sorts of ways to place little jobs in my way that I felt I just had to complete before I could begin writing.

The interesting question here is why I have carried on like this if writing content is actually what I have wanted to be doing? The answer lies in the ‘productive’ nature of this particular procrastination – productive procrastination. This is where you cannot see that you are procrastinating on a certain task because it is masked by the fact that you are being productive in other directions.

For me, the procrastinating I was doing on writing content was hidden by the productive nature of the other blog-related tasks I was ticking off the list. This is why productive procrastination is particularly insidious. We’re taught from an early age that being productive is a good thing, but in this case it is actually blocking the real aim.

‘Productive procrastination’- you are getting stuff done, just not the stuff that you should be doing.

Re-focus on the necessary

So it occurred to me: what’s important when you are trying to build out a decent blog, with a solid community of readers? What’s gonna drive people to my site? Killer content, that’s what. Not the color of my header, not the layout of my columns. You cannot search based on the ‘dope-ness’ of a site’s layout. Content is king, and that is precisely the thing my productive procrastination has been preventing me from producing. No more! Now I recognise the issue, I’m going to take the great advice I read here, live with the imperfect and, well, just get things out there. Here we go!

What about you?

Have you noticed yourself being really ‘busy’ but not getting important things done?
Do you have tips for breaking through periods of procrastination?
What other damaging habits have you had to overcome to be more productive?

Please feel free to leave a comment, I’d love to hear form you.