Procrastivities – Let’s be Rational

jeff

Procrastivities are what you do instead of the thing you should be doing.  From the root word procrastinate, just add some festive activities and voila.  For example, watching Tik-Tok videos.  Not all procrastivities are created equal, though.  This blog is about improving your life by making your procrastination more productive or avoided altogether so that’s the basis on which procrastivities are judged.

After many informal interviews, here are some of the more common procrastivities:

  • Gaming – everything from Suduku to Call of Duty; personally, I play Call of Suduku
  • Scrolling your feed – this includes Tik-Tok, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, even My Space
  • Organizing/Cleaning – this is mainly done by older homeowners, but that’s who I mainly surveyed
  • Hobbies – crafting, making music and reading (yes, I’m calling reading a hobby) are a few I heard mentioned often
  • Connecting with Friends – not the TV show, although that’s a typical procrastivity, too.

Obviously, mindless scrolling of your feed is probably a less valuable use of your time than say organizing because organizing sets you up for success later while scrolling your feed is usually just a time waster.  Also, the longer you spend on the procrastivity, the more cost it has to you in the form of reduced productivity.  The benefit you get from a procrastivity, contrarily, will diminish over time.  The following chart shows the relationship between the costs and benefits of any given procrastivity.  If it looks like a supply & demand chart, that’s because productivity is an economic metric and the laws of nature prevail. When the cost of the procrastivity outweighs the benefit of the procrastivity, any rational person would stop doing it.

Side note:  the “laws” of supply and demand, though still widely taught, have largely been thrown out by economists due to the flaw of assuming that people behave rationally in the market place.  In fact, people are not rational – neither in the market place nor in their own procrastination.  But the more rationally you behave, the easier it will be to control your procrastinative urges. Good luck, Procrasti-Nation!