Confessions of a procrastiplanner and how I shake it off

Want to know a dirty little secret?

Hi, my name’s Ben and I’m a high-functioning procrastiplanner.

Procrastiplanning is essentially procrastination where large dollops of planning, low priority admin tasks or over-organisation postpone the more important things you actually need or want to do.

I do it less and less now, but it took work.

For instance, I have spent hours rewriting gym workouts, plotting the perfect weekly schedule in 15-minute increments and gorging myself on all the information I can about the best systems for productivity/time management/content creation.

The time I spend procrastiplanning is 97% wasted.

Sometimes a golden nugget of insight or actionable decision emerge. And there’s nothing wrong, broadly speaking, with writing workouts, scheduling or information consumption.

But mostly I end up creating electronic documents I’ll never use or writing pages in journals I’ll never re-read: I’m left feeling guilty and a little disgusted at myself for wasting time – one of life’s most precious commodities.

How I stop procrastiplanning

I can now catch myself procrastiplanning, drop it and move on to something else. Meditation, cognitive behavioural therapy and working with a counsellor gave me tools to recognise the patterns and ease out of them.

I have developed some methods of yanking myself back into the present when I feel myself sliding towards procrastiplanning. They helped me, so I thought I’d share them here in case they might help should you find yourself struggling with it.

Here are six methods to stop procrastiplanning when it rears its colour-coded, neatly-bulleted head:

1. Be utterly unproductive on purpose:
   I throw my phone in a drawer on do not disturb, go to a place that’s as free from distractions as possible and stop for five minutes. I loosely observe my thoughts, allowing the tornado in my head to spin a little slower or maybe even stop. If I still feel the urge to procrastiplan I sit a little longer – literally doing nothing. Importantly, I avoid the urge to see what I’m doing as a magic solution. I embrace boredom and inactivity because eventually from this stillness emerges a clarity of what I need to be doing in that moment and then I move forwards.
2. Share my shame:
   I talk it through with my incredibly patient and supportive partner. I force myself to read my notes aloud to her or explain my endeavour. The beauty of adding a second brain to the mix is that she sometimes sees a valuable thread I need to pull. Or she gently probes the process, encouraging me to question the why to what I’m doing. Relaying things to her often shines a light on procrastiplanning in a new way and lets me drop it or turn it into something useful.
3. Step into the elevator:
   I imagine a claustrophobic situation. If I were trapped in an elevator with a stranger and they were relaying what I’m doing to me as advice: would I listen and take it onboard as useful? If the stranger sounds a bit barmy, the evidence speaks for itself. If there are elements of what they’re saying that resonate, I focus on those aspects and stay in the elevator a little while longer. It is a vivid if absurd image that really helps me.
4. Take my bum off the seat:
   I move to interrupt my thought patterns and distract myself with a physical endeavour of some kind. It might be a walk around the block, taking the bins out, a short lunch run or a handful of press-ups in a different room. The point is to throw the circuit breaker enough to clear my mind.
5. Reflect honestly:
   If I do go down the procrastiplanning rabbit hole, I remind myself some useful insights come from the process even if I’m feeling guilty in that moment. I reframe it as putting in the reps for actual productive behaviour. What did I learn from the process and what will I do differently and better next time?
6. Create impulsively:
   I make something utterly random. It could be a doodle, a drawing, a string of nonsense words or some erratic lines on a page. I read somewhere how the celebrated state of “Flow” first, stems from action and second, is very similar to the state children are in while playing. I have been experimenting with the connection between these two ideas and if I procrastiplan or generally feel a bit off, I harken back to my childhood and do something I enjoyed as a kid. Again, like many of these strategies, there’s no strict ulterior motive to the playing. But I have personally found the play is not only fun, but it also often blossoms into a deeply harmonious state of flow comparable to some of the most productive creative endeavours I’ve experienced.

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