Little Tasks Are The Devil….Or Our Savior (consecutive writing day #18)

I wanted to talk about one of the devils of productivity. It’s the devil because it gives you the illusion of being productive while you are actually avoiding what you know you ought to be doing. Everyone has experienced this. In fact, most people’s apartments and houses owe their cleanliness to other tasks that they’d rather not do.

For me it is definitely true. I’ve never cleaned, done laundry, or made lists as much as when I had an essay to do for school that I really didn’t want to do. It really felt like a win win. You get to avoid doing what you are supposed to do but not feel guilty about not doing it. You get to feel productive, get tasks done that probably needed to be done anyway, and not do what you don’t want to do.

The biggest advantage of this phenomenon, however, is that it offers you priceless insights to things you enjoy doing and things you don’t. For example, when I set out to write a blog post I have no urge to do laundry in the middle of it. When I would write an essay for school, I would set out avoiding it at all costs by doing laundry until I could figure out a way to write it in a cheeky way that I thought would piss off the teacher.

Now I’m not saying that every work task has to be all roses and butterflies, but I am saying that if you feel a strong urge to do mindless, unimportant tasks that could easily be completed later, you are probably having a subconscious rejection-reaction to the task at hand. I’m also not saying that breaks are necessary for quality, productive work. But you all know what I am talking about. It’s the feeling that makes you feel accomplished from writing a list of things to do instead of actually doing them. The feeling that drives you to clean your whole house because you are so adverse to starting or finishing an assignment.

The moral of this story? Use the small tasks feeling as a way to gauge things that you enjoy and don’t enjoy. I would say it would be advantageous for you to, as best you can, remove those activities that cause you to do everything else besides that activity. Just some friendly advice and some that I am currently trying to implement into my own life.