Money – Procrastinator's Den

The “Productivity Equivalence”

Since the last quarter of 2015 I’ve been changing my habits to positively change my life. I’ve changed the way I see time and also what I do with it. All of this to start applying the “Productivity Equivalence” or SE for short.

PE = Sleep + Diet + Exercise + Meditation/Prayer/Silence – Stress – Distractions

This simple equivalence tells you where to put in and were to take out to attain a higher level of productivity. Higher levels of productivity give you more results, whether your goal is being healthier, spending more time with your family, being wealthier. What this means is simple. You can’t get better results by removing where you should be adding and adding where you should be removing. Also, you can’t eliminate any of the components totally, either the good ones or the bad ones. The good ones have minimums you have to try to achieve and the bad ones, no matter how hard you try to eliminate them they find a way to creep up again if you ever take your eye off of them. You can’t, for instance, stop sleeping altogether and use that time to exercise because that would not work, the result would be a lesser PE value than before. And remember, this is only an equivalence, it’s not a complete equation for Productivity, you can think of things missing here that are important to you. You should put them in and evaluate for yourself what is better. I use it as a reminder and as a guide of what to look for if I suddenly notice a drop in my productivity, so I can make an introspective assessment of what might have changed on this equivalency and work on that.
Let’s take a moment now to view the components.

Sleep. You can tell me “I can’t dream of increasing my sleep time, pun intended, that would reduce my productivity, I need to work, take care of of the kids the house all of that, I can’t afford to sleep” A very common objection to the sleep suggestion. I get it, life is complicated, requires a lot of work and time, you could never sleep more. But here’s the sad part. Sleep deprivation has health and psychological consequences, and the worse part is that even a small deviation from our ideal amount of sleep for a prolonged period can have long term consequences. That being said, an all nighter won’t kill you, but try to make them as few as possible.

Diet. This one is obvious, we need to eat right, I don’t need to tell you that, again. Now, maybe something you didn’t know is this hypothesis that says that our willpower is like a gas tank, we can use it again and again and again until it’s drained and then we succumb to temptation much easier. What does that mean? That we need to be careful on what we use our willpower. If we have to refrain ourselves from taking a donut instead of a piece of fruit from a platter in a conference, then we will have used some willpower to do that, if we have to choose from taking the elevator instead of the stairs then again, willpower. What to do then? We need to save our willpower for really important things. We can remove this decisions in two ways. Always make a decision in advance, we talked about triggers before, well, here’s an example of one of them. “If I have to go up I always take the stairs” “If I want a snack I’ll never eat pastry” We decide beforehand what we want. We can compound that with physically removing temptation and get as far as we can from those delicious chocolate chip cookies.

So, as I’ve accustomed you to this before I won’t change it today. I’m going to stop here for length but I’ll continue tomorrow, how about that, a two day piece. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you, please comment down here, even if it’s only to say hello.

“Second hand procrastination” is it a thing?

A few weeks back, in my post titled “What kind of procrastinator are you?” we talked about the different kinds of procrastinators. I want to revisit and expand on the ones that have the “student’s syndrome”. We’ve seen how they leave until the last possible moment their tasks, and then rush on to do them, their bodies full of adrenaline, cortisol, from within, and from the outside they might use stimulants such as caffeine, taurine or even others even more intense substances. In the future I will refer to this type of procrastinator as “The Rusher”, because, he rushes to get his job done, sometimes even regardless of the consequences.

The Rusher goes to extremes to get the things done at the last possible moment, just when the pressure, exhilaration and anxiety surpass his content and calm brought by doing something else. Now, this would be the end of the conversation if not for the fact that, more often than not, this rush brings unwanted results. As he sprints to the finish line The Rusher might want to cut some corners, maybe not on the job he’s doing if he’s got high standards, but on the other aspects of his personal and professional lives.

The Rusher, is by his procrastination a risk taker, as he won’t be taking into account that Murphy may break havoc with his plans of finishing the task. That’s when an unexpected outage in the Internet, an empty printer cartridge, a late delivery all become life or death emergencies that have to be handled at any cost. The procrastinator suddenly starts asking for favors left and right, and his relationships might suffer from this or he might end up indebted much more for this help for much more than the value of the favor entitled in other more normal situations. Also our Rusher might, for example, neglect his commitments to other people or other projects, stressing unwittingly those relationships. All of this without the need of there being an extra setback on the task at hand. The simple fact of having to set everything aside because all available time, every ounce of energy, all of the attention have to be concentrated on the task can cause problems with others. A commitment previously engaged, could be even previous to the assignment or existence of the task, might have to be canceled because it’s priority suddenly drops, as the task’s rises. That commitment is now a casualty of The Rusher’s procrastination. The Rusher is no longer harming himself, he’s harming others who now suffer from this “Second Hand Procrastination”. As second hand smoking is unhealthy second hand procrastination is also harmful to the ones around the procrastinator. It cost them his time, his affections, and it can even have a monetary cost with things as late fees, non refundable tickets going to waste and others. In his professional life The Rusher might even be affecting his coworkers and subordinates, by making them miss important personal activities because of having to rush to finish some task that was waiting on his desk for 2 weeks but now has to be finished by morning. This is one of multitude of reasons why reducing our procrastinating is important. It gives us more clarity, more options, improves the chances of success and might even save a relationship or two.

Has this nudged you to work on your procrastination issues? If so, or even if not, I’d love to read some comments bellow, in the mean time, have an excellent week, and remember that on Sunday it’s Saint Valentine, so better be prepared so you don’t have to cancel it with a work emergency, lack of reservations or whatever other thing you’re putting off.