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Spending your day on planning apps is procrastination, not productivity

· 2 min read

Procrastination

Everyone has issues with procrastination, including you, myself, and everyone else we know. Speaking for myself, I can easily spend 30 minutes thinking about a 1-minute unpleasant task I do not want to do. After the unpleasant tasks multiply, procrastination gets worse, and there is a big need to feel productive.

The illusion of productivity​

This is when a person will start using planning applications such as Notion, Trello, Asana, etc, to start having a sense of progress. This is an illusion because the person gets the dopamine hit from organizing tasks. This tricks the brain into feeling accomplished and creates a false sense of progress. In the end, there is no actual outcome. 3 hours have been spent organizing a plan and 0 hours executing a plan.

Tips​

Plan, but not over-plan​

Planning can save a person a lot of time before executing the tasks. Usually, a kanban board or other fancy tools are not required. A simple to-do list is enough. It can be a page in Apple Notes, a Slack message to yourself, or even just notes on a piece of paper.

Set a timeframe​

An easy but effective way to overcome procrastination is to set a timebox for a task. Allocating 1 hour for an unpleasant task and knowing that after this amount of time, a person will be free to continue with more pleasant activities is often enough motivation to start.

Minimize distractions​

Having distractions in a person's work environment could be the main reason for never starting a boring task. Working in a room alone, with all the notifications closed and without social media can be lifesaving.

Conclusion​

If I had to summarize this blog post in one sentence, it would be "Spend more time executing your plan and less time organizing it". Good planning can save a lot of hours, but planning is not enough to make progress by itself.

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