The Procrastinator's Guide to Productivity

I remember around the time I was just starting my creative career, my older brother, an infamous procrastinator, shared with me his theory on leaving things to the last minute. He had come to the conclusion that putting something off until the last minute was actually the most efficient way to handle a task. The way he saw it was, if he gave himself a week to do something it would take seven days, but if he only left himself a day, it would take only take one. Naturally, I laughed this off as the self-rationalizing of a chronic procrastinator. Nonsense.

Until I came across Parkinson’s law.

I was looking for ways to teach a unit on productivity to my Business of Graphic Design class and came across this maxim (written in the 50s by a historian named C Northcote Parkinson):

“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”

Essentially, the more time you give to a task the longer it will take. 

But just because somebody wrote it, called it a law, and now we all say it’s true doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.

The concept can actually be quickly applied to a lot of classic work situations and raise valid questions:

• Do I really need a week for this?

• Could I just get this done today?

• Should I binge River Monsters today and work on this tomorrow?

That's where day-naming comes in. Instead of letting a project float around your schedule for however long feels comfortable, you compress it into a specific day. Give yourself Tuesday to work on Project X, and suddenly Project X has to fit into Tuesday. Exactly what Parkinson was on about.

The Stupidest Hacks That Actually Work

(This is a five-part series. Find the links to parts #1 to #4 below in Further Reading.)

5. Day-Naming

In previous issues, I've talked about to-do listing and time-blocking, but sometimes you've got lots of time for lots of ongoing things. It can be hard to look ahead and decide when to block time for stuff like sales funnels or blog writing.

Day-naming (along with some clever tweaks) can make you a low-intensity productivity wizard.

I’ve mentioned before that my Mondays are Biz Dev Mondays and that’s not because I’m some a high-efficiency business machine. 

I do everything I can to keep calendar appointments and deadlines away from Mondays because biz dev isn’t something that comes naturally. When you don’t focus on it, it becomes reactionary - you reply to opportunities that come in on their own and never seek out the work you really want. (Until it’s too late.)

So I set a day where I give myself the goal of reaching out to 10 people. I also use Mondays to work on my website, update case studies, invoice and log hours. So it’s more of an admin day sometimes but that’s low intensity work that needs to happen at a sustainable cadence.

How could you apply this type of thinking to a client project?

You’d think it’s just picking a day of the week and proclaiming that this day will now be Project X day - and you’d be right, but there’s a key tweak to it: Set a check-in with someone.

If you’re lucky, you’ve got someone in your network you can lean on, but in most cases it will be the client themselves. So set a date when you’ll show them the next update.

Give yourself time. If I know I need a full day on something, and the timeline permits, I’ll push it a whole week out.

Say we kick off on Friday, I will tell them their next update is the following Friday, even if it’s only 8 hours of work.  

This sounds dishonest or irresponsible but there’s a few reasons it’s neither:

1. You never know what else will pop up. Sometimes even if you know something will take 8 hours, you don’t nail it in that time. You want to be able to have time to put it down and come back to it.

2. Give the client time for what they have to do on their end, even if it’s just mentally prepare.

3. When you have multiple projects on the go, you’ll need to factor time to switch between them.

So it would go like this:

• Friday: Kickoff

• Monday: Biz Dev

• Tuesday: Other projects

• Wednesday: The actual named-day I work on it

• Thursday: Other projects (but buffer if I need it)

• Friday: Show client

Of course, if it’s a rush job, you can always compress the schedule but the reasons above are exactly why you charge a premium for a rush job. It’s what you’re giving up that costs. 

The beauty of this approach is that it works whether you're naturally disciplined or a chronic procrastinator. If you're disciplined, day-naming gives structure to unfocused time. If you're a procrastinator, it creates the pressure you secretly need to get moving. Either way, you're working with your tendencies instead of fighting them.

My brother was right about one thing:  constraints force efficiency. 

The difference-maker is creating those constraints intentionally instead of letting panic be your project manager.

Further Reading

This issue conclude the series of Stupidest Hacks That Actually Work. You can read the rest of them here. It’s been a great summer sharing what tips I have to keep productive in the relax-time months. We’ll be kicking back into creative process for the fall with lots of fun announcements coming up. Stay tuned.

Parting Thought

A lot of managing your time can feel like you’re being dishonest with people. It only feels that way if you’re not sure how to allocate your time. The more you apply methods like time-blocking, day-sequencing, and day-naming the more certainty you can have in your estimates. The creative process can seem selfish and indulgent a lot of the time but understanding how your brain does what it does will make you treat it like any other bodily process. I know exactly how long I need in the bathroom so stop knocking.

Schedule your ramp-ups and your wind-downs. Get in the zone. Make a day of it.