I looked up at the clock.
12:02
Yeech. Well, at least it was a productive morning.
A little voice said “But was it really?”
To which I answered back to myself (no one was around thankfully), “No, not really. I was 100% productively procrastinating.”
What is productively procrastinating?
For the record, I stole…er…borrowed this term from Leila Hormozi, a business guru I follow on YouTube.
It was a new term, but not a new concept. Dan Sullivan calls it “Getting ready to get ready.”
And what they mean is most high achievers when they procrastinate, don’t sit around playing Xbox.
We productively procrastinate. We fool ourselves into thinking we’re “getting things done”, but in moments of honesty we know we’re full of it.
Here’s how to tell if you’re doing it.
The morning I had that conversation myself, I spent 4 hours cleaning up Members’ boards and updating workbooks and allowing myself to go down rabbit holes of “research”.
None of those were “big marble” items. None of those will help scale Financial Zen. ALL of those are 100% in Chantal’s job description.
But the truth was, I didn’t really WANT to put the big marble in the jar.
The big marble that morning was supposed to be writing copy for our new website. I HATE writing copy.
So instead of writing, I allowed myself to productively procrastinate.
And at the end of 4 hours, I had no copy written. All I had done was push the peas around my plate.
How about you?
The good-ish news is that we usually productively procrastinate in the same ways each time. So it’s easy to spot and call yourself out.
I know when I do it, it looks like that morning.
(Unfortunately, recognizing it doesn’t prevent it 100% of the time.)
But the more often you recognize it, the less time you’ll spend doing it and the more time you’ll spend dropping those boulders in the jar.
