In my one year working for myself, I found something surprising.
I am not busy. On a weekday, I have time to go out with friends on coffee and lunch dates. I get to spend all my weekends doing something fun—reading, quilting, or cooking. Some weekdays, I go out for long walks listening to music.
I’ve had time for long conversations with friends whenever they would call up.
I work, on average, four hours a day, four days a week, sometimes five days.
I have also launched my coaching business and passion project this year. I have been regularly coaching clients and writing (150+ articles averaging ~1200 words). I have also been on seven live workshops and long-term courses, taking time to study, learn and implement the concepts in my professional and personal life.
I’ve been the most productive in my career this year despite working only 20 hours a week instead of 60 hours a week.
Reflecting on what made a big difference to my productivity, I realise that at least 80% of my career in the last five years in my corporate stint has been spent on “busy work”.
What is busy work?
Busy work occupies time. It drains your energy and resources. Busy work is mostly fire-fighting and resolving crisis work.
This kind of work saps your time and doesn’t leave you feeling satisfied or content with your work at the end of the day.
In the middle of bustling urban Los Angeles is an active paleontological site called La Brea Tar Pits.
The tar pits were and are carnivore and predator traps. Four centimetres of tar is enough to snare a large animal.
Palaeontologists have unearthed fossils of ice-age animals trapped in the pits. These include mammoths, grizzly bears, black bears, giant jaguars, sabre-toothed cats, dire wolves, giant mastodons, prehistoric camels, and ancient bison.
It’s surprising, isn’t it?
The deadly tar pits ensnared many creatures. The dire wolves were the most common species excavated from the tar pits, and more than four thousand dire wolves have been pulled out.
It makes you wonder how so many dire wolves got trapped in tar pits that were not even four centimetres deep.
Say, accidentally, a large animal like a mastodon got stuck in the tar pit. The tar pit is only a few centimetres deep, but they are sticky!
Once stuck in the pits, the mastodon will eventually sink into the earth. But it will linger on the surface of the tar pit for at least 17-20 weeks. The stuck Mastodons are tempting and easy bait for roaming scavengers and predators like dire wolves.
A pack of dire wolves would pounce on the stuck mastodon, and while gorging on, the prey would get stuck in the tar pit themselves!
Once stuck, it was downhill from there on.
Being busy can be similar to being stuck in a tar pit. Once you are stuck there, more work comes at you like the dire wolves, and you slowly drown with all the work.
The effect is not immediate, but like the tar pit, the busy work very slowly and gradually over a long period overwhelms and sinks your energy and resources.
Let’s look closely at the tar pits of your work that cause you to drain your life energy at work. The four things we will cover in this article are
1. The Hamster Wheel
2. Validation from Work
3. Lack of Gatekeeping
4. Consequences of being busy
The Hamster Wheel
In the community I live in, there is an ironing couple. The couple irons washed clothes from all the apartments. They iron clothes for a living. For every cloth they iron, they make 10-12 rupees.
So, how they make money is proportional to how many clothes they iron.
I did a quick calculation: If they iron 30 pieces of clothing every hour and work for 8 hours a day, six days a week, they would make 62,400 rupees a month. So two people would make twice the money – 124,800 rupees.
To earn this money, they must be at work every minute. They can’t afford a wasted minute or action. Taking a day off because they are sick would mean a loss of income.
In their line of work, being productive means performing income-earning tasks as much as possible during the day and maximising their earning potential.
The downside of this kind of work is that having boundaries and a life outside work becomes challenging. The couple has three young children and older parents to take care of. They work 12 hours here every day, six days a week.
The work is repetitive and keeps them occupied all day, leaving little time for other things.
Most of us working in the knowledge economy do not have this problem. But we behave like the couple who are hard at work ironing, thinking that the time spent doing “work” is how we earn our salaries.
Most of you reading this article are paid to think deeply, strategise, plan, execute, and achieve goals and objectives that significantly impact your team or company.
But there is a gaping chasm between your actual work and the work you are supposed to be doing.
If you get the sense that your work day is like a hamster wheel, where once you get on, it is hard to get off for days or months on end, it is time for some serious reflection.
Stop the hamster wheel, take some time out in the day and take a piece of paper. On the left, write down everything you are doing, and on the right, write everything you ought to be doing. What is the difference?
Is the hamster wheel churning out something productive or keeping you busy? Are you sinking into the tar pit with all your work, or are you able to avoid falling into the trap?
Validation from Work
There is a mythological story about Hanuman, a deity in the Hindu religion revered and prayed by millions of people in India. Hanuman is well known for his extraordinary physical strength and prowess.
As a child, Hanuman was mischievous and often played pranks on sages. Using his precocious powers, Hanuman interrupted offerings into sacrificial fires and disrupted the sages’ meditation.
One day, a sage troubled by Hanuman cursed him that he would forget his powers, as he had wreaked havoc with them. But when reminded of his powers by another person, he would be able to access and use his powers.
Sometimes, we are like Hanuman. We can access our superpowers and skills to the fullest extent only at work.
Being praised, acknowledged, and rewarded for our work feels good. Being rewarded with a promotion, bonus, status, perks, and awards feels exhilarating. It feels satisfying to be seen and spoken about in a good light by our peers, family and friends.
This validation that we receive from work can often be a trap. It is addictive and hence not enough. We crave more and more. No matter how much we receive, we want more.
At some point, our work becomes an exercise in chasing validation because only that validation helps us feel worthy and better about ourselves. Without the validation we receive from the work and the workplace, we do not know our own worth.
This is especially true when we spend a disproportionate amount of energy at work, thereby taking it away from other areas of life. This is not just the physical time you spend at work but also mentally.
You could not be at work but on a walk or spending time with your loved ones, but the work is always running in the background.
If something goes wrong at work, then there is a sense of your entire life crumbling down. Problems at work take over your mental bandwidth, day in and out.
If you think this applies to you even a little bit, take 30 minutes out of your work day to reflect on the following questions.
What happens when you are not busy? Does it diminish how you think of yourself? Does it matter what others perceive? What are the emotional needs that work meets for you?
There are no right or wrong answers to the above questions; it is about making space to reflect honestly and courageously on what is going on.
Lack of Gatekeeping
A liminal deity is a god or goddess who presides over doorways, thresholds, or gates—any space that indicates a crossover of boundaries.
Janus, the Roman God after whom the month of January is named, is a liminal deity. Janus is represented by two heads, one looking into the past and another looking into the future.
The concept of gatekeeping and the need to watch over boundaries are prevalent in all old cultures. A liminal deity is found in almost all mythologies.
Without a liminal deity to watch over, there is chaos.
Chaos reigns in our workplace, keeping us busy without gatekeeping. If other people’s priorities constantly dictate your work day, then you know that there is no gatekeeping.
This is more prevalent when we say yes to our boss, senior stakeholders, clients and other people who we do not want to offend.
Gatekeeping is missing when our default response to doing other people’s work is yes. Gatekeeping is missing when you cannot find time or energy to do the job for which you are getting paid. Gatekeeping is missing when you are more busy than being productive. Gatekeeping is missing when what you’ve planned for the day, month, or year has been left aside to do more urgent work.
If you are struggling with more work than you can handle, consider what gatekeeping is in place.
Where is the clear decision point in your workflow when you say yes or no to work? What are your criteria for saying yes to additional work? Is it a strong yes or a yes by default? Is your work taking you closer to achieving the goals and objectives for which you are paid?
Consequences of being busy
There are three main consequences of being busy over being productive. And they are not desirable.
No Time for Future Proofing
There is no time for learning and growth if you are always busy. You are tapping into skills and knowledge you picked up earlier in your career when you did not have time to learn, think and implement. You are spending from what you have earned earlier, and you may not have the time to pick up the current or future skills you need to do your work better.
De-Training of Attention Muscles
Busy work can be shallow work, and more often than not, it is also multi-tasking. You are constantly switching between tasks to put out whichever fires are burning dangerously at the moment.
Doing this constantly will de-train your attention muscles, making it hard for you to focus when you need to. This is why you are drawing blanks when you finally sit down to create that important slide deck, write that key document, or figure out a long-term strategy. Being busy all the time makes it hard to work on strategic or big-picture things.
Chronic Stress
When you are busy most of your work day, your body is in a constant state of stress response. The body is geared up to fight or flee, which is helpful only during actual moments of crisis.
This stress response can become chronic and routine, making you tired and overwhelmed. A heightened and prolonged stress response can also reduce your ability to be responsive and make you reactive.
Summary
To summarise the key points in this article, if you feel overwhelmed, dissatisfied, and stressed most of your work days, then it is time to reflect on whether you are busy or productive. There are three reasons why we would choose being busy over being productive.
1. We are on the hamster wheel and are finding it challenging to get off it. The nature of our work can make it very hard for us to pause, stop, and rest.
2. We crave and love the validation we receive at work. Sometimes, it can lead us to do way more than we are able to when our self-worth is tied closely to how we are valued at work.
3. A lack of gatekeeping leads us to take on more work than we can handle. Our default response to more work is “yes,” not “let me think about it and get back to you.”
The consequences of being busy are that it is hard to make time for learning and growth, it makes it hard to focus as your attention muscles are being de-trained by shallow work, and your body is in a state of chronic stress, leaving you tired, overwhelmed, and reactive.
Several strategies exist for being productive instead of busy. But before the strategies can be implemented, we must understand the root causes that drive us to choose ‘busyness’ over ‘productivity’.
If you want to find out what strategies you can implement to get out of ‘busy-ness’ and move into more productive days without working 12-hour work days, check this article out.
In Arizona and Mexico, at twilight, thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats wing out of their caves to go on one of their famous hunting sprees.
A large colony of Mexican free-tailed bats can consume an estimated 250 tonnes of insects in a single night. The colonies have large appetites!
Aaron Corcoran, a biologist, was studying the hunting habits of the Mexican free-tailed bats when he spotted something unusual.
Bats use a variety of calls to communicate with each other and to navigate, and most of these calls are outside of human hearing range. Corcoran’s ultrasonic microphones picked up an unusual frequency that the bats were sending out when they were about to snag their prey.
Corcoran and his colleague William Conner studied this phenomenon further. Through a series of experiments, they found that bats emit these special signals, which interfere with and confuse the navigational signals of the other bats in the vicinity.
Bats about to snag their prey send out these “jammer” signals, loaded with too many frequencies, throwing the other bats off track and causing distraction.
The free-tailed bats considerably reduced their competitor’s success chances of capturing this prey from 65% to 18% by sending out distractions.
Distractions are aplenty in our lives in this modern age of working and living. When trying to get things done or achieve our goals, distractions throw us off course. Like the competitor of the free-tailed bats about to snag its prey, our path is jammed up by distractions, reducing our chances and success rate of achieving our goals.
So, how do we tame the distractions we encounter and move towards living and doing our work with intention?
First, we need to be able to name the distractions. We must look closely at them with curiosity and understand their nature. We can tame them once we see them for what they are and name them.
Why is naming distractions important?
Most often, we employ strategies to manage distractions without truly understanding them. This leads to strategies that do not work in the long term, and we slip into old habits of working. This gets us into the vicious loop of letting things slide until we are forced to do something drastic to reclaim our focus and intention.
Once we are able to name our distractions, we can find strategies uniquely suited to managing and working with them.
We will explore in detail three broad categories of distractions.
1. External
2. Task Related
3. Internal
External Distractions
The source of these distractions is outside of your immediate task. They do not originate from within you or from your task. These distractions have a strong pull on your senses. They have strong sensory stimuli that make them potent sources of distraction.
The three major sources of external distractions are
Environment
People
Technology
Environment
As I write this article, the only sounds I can hear trickle into my study are the distant hum of traffic, occasional movement in the apartment above me, wind in the trees, and my keyboard clacking. It is a quiet day.
My environment is conducive to deep work right now. But not always.
On other days, there would be a drilling sound from the floors above, blaring Bollywood songs from loudspeakers, frequent doorbells, and people having conversations within earshot.
Each environment is unique in its endless source of noise and interruptions. There are days when they do not matter much, but when you are doing work that needs high focus or mental energy, these distractions can become bothersome.
People
When I was working in an office, there was always a shortage of space, so we ended up hot desking and often had less than one foot distance from my co-worker.
Colleagues dropping in for a chat, children running into your office to ask questions, and family members interrupting your work are some of the typical distractions you would have from “live” people in your surroundings.
When your energy is low, this distraction can drive you up the wall and reduce your capacity to regulate your emotions and capacity to respond.
Technology
Technology as a source of distraction deserves a whole article in itself. This particular type of distraction is now ubiquitous. Phones, computers, smart watches, tablets, and smart home appliances are loaded with endless opportunities to “notify” us of something. Almost all devices are designed by default to send us notifications from inbuilt apps or the ones we install.
Email, phone, message, chat, social media, delivery, news, stock market price, Duolingo, meditation, drinking water, fasting—every app on our devices sends us notifications throughout the day.
These notifications are harder to resist than the other kinds, and they are addictive, too.
Task Related Distractions
The source of this kind of distraction arises from the task at hand. These occur when our attention is diverted to activities or tasks unrelated to our primary goal.
Let’s explore the three types of task-related distractions.
Multi-Tasking
Hyper Focus on Minor Details
Productive Procrastination
Multi-Tasking
Multi-tasking is better described as task switching. More often than not, we do not do multiple tasks in parallel; we switch quickly from one task to another.
This is my major source of distraction and has been my Achilles heel for a long time. I am writing this article in a digital co-working space, and there is a check-in every hour. While writing this article, I popped into the chat to quip with other co-workers about the check-in question. Thankfully, the facilitator has better impulse control than I do, and he turned off the chat window, thereby saving us from ourselves.
This constant switching of tasks can be an impediment and completely undesirable when the task at hand demands our full attention. Constant task switching also taxes our brain, tiring it out and making it inefficient.
This also reduces our ability to return to the optimum level of focus on the primary task. Research shows that task switching affects our concentration, performance and efficiency.
Hyper Focus on Minor Details
When I had to prepare for a difficult meeting, I spent a lot of time hyper-focusing on minor details that would have no bearing on the actual meeting.
I might spend hours obsessing over the correct shade of red to use in a box or adjusting the opacity of shadows in a PowerPoint presentation.
This is a typical response to stress or anxiety that is undercurrent to the task that we are performing. It is likely that to manage that stress or anxiety, we might unconsciously hyperfocus on minor details that have minimal relevance, thereby distracting us from the task at hand.
Productive Procrastination
There have been many times when I had to start working on a big project, but instead, I have spent the day cleaning and re-organising my house.
Instead of working on the difficult task, I would clean my decade’s worth of mail sitting in my inbox, thinking I was doing something productive. It needs to be done at some point, so now is a good time!
Productive procrastination can take the form of organising and tidying your physical or digital environment when you have a significant task that needs your attention. These are ‘productive’ but completely unnecessary in-the-moment activities that distract us from our discomfort with the task at hand.
Internal Distractions
The source of these distractions is within you—your thoughts, feelings, and overall state of body. Let’s examine each one closely in this section.
In 2014, I attended my first ten-day silent meditation retreat (a traditional Vipassana retreat). We had to surrender all our devices and reading and writing materials as part of the retreat. We had to surrender every single source of external stimulation so that we could work with our minds.
I was expecting to feel a sense of relief and quiet without being constantly tethered to devices and having to respond to every notification.
However, I discovered that I had the limitless capacity to distract myself using my thoughts, emotions, past events, and future worries instead of focusing on my breath or scanning my body.
These are the true sources of distraction, manifesting in our behaviour as reacting to external or task-related distractions.
These internal distractions are triggers which can set off a chain of reactions in our behaviour, like reducing our tolerance and acting out to stimuli in our environment or our tasks.
Let’s examine the three kinds of internal distractions arising from within us.
Emotions
Physical Sensations
Thoughts
Emotions
Emotions are feelings combined with some really strong thoughts. These are feelings loaded with stories.
Strong emotions can arise from reliving the past, something in the present or thinking about the future. The intensity of these emotions can be strong and impede our ability to stay focused on the task at hand.
Physical Sensations
When doing 24-hour fasts, I was acutely aware of the physical sensations of hunger and my body’s prompting for food. That made it hard for me to focus on my work for the last 2 hours of my fast.
Physical signals like hunger, fatigue, discomfort, and pain can make it hard to stay focused. These sensations can narrow our focus to what is happening in our body and signal our brain to focus on that to alleviate the discomfort. This consumes a lot of mental energy, making it hard to stay focused on doing something that doesn’t relate to alleviating this discomfort.
Thoughts
The thoughts in our heads, especially if we are stuck with one or two of them, can distract us from the present moment and take our focus away.
These can take the form of thought loops, where a set of thoughts keeps running in the mind, like a spin-dry cycle on the washing machine without a stop button.
Sometimes, there are chains of thoughts, where one thought leads to another, and then we are down a rabbit hole without the awareness of where we are going with the thought and whether that’s the place where we want to be in our heads.
Emotions, physical sensations, and thoughts are not distinct but closely related. Any of these can cause a cascade of reactions in the body and mind and set the other two off. A thought stuck in our heads can lead us to relive an intense emotional experience, setting off uncomfortable physical sensations in our bodies.
This is not just applicable to unpleasant or obsessive thoughts but equally applicable to pleasant emotions like excitement or joy.
In a state of excitement or joy, it can be challenging to bring our attention to the present moment and stay focused on what’s in hand.
How do you know when something is distracting, even if it seems productive?
Activities by themselves are not distracting. What makes anything distracting is if it does not let us accomplish what we intend to do.
If I am sitting down to work and intend to complete this article but am getting pulled away by the notifications on my phone or internet rabbit holes or building castles in my head, then I am getting distracted.
Distractions are anything that takes us away from our intention and objective of the task at hand.
If I have nothing to do and am just unwinding, scrolling through Instagram is not a distraction but something I choose to do to unwind.
If I chat with a friend while writing this article for a minute, I am not distracted, provided I can return my full focus for the rest of the writing session and leave the conversation outside this task.
Distraction is when we get carried away to places we do not intend to go right now, especially if we have somewhere else to be. I want to drive to the medical store to get some medicines, but I have a craving for ice cream, so I go down to the ice cream store to buy ice cream and return home without the medicines! Now, that is a distraction.
Distractions are not the villains we make them out to be.
They are a valuable source of information on what is happening within and around us and an opportunity to engage or re-engage in what we are doing intentionally.
To summarise what we’ve covered so far.
Distractions are anything that consistently takes us away from our intended task, making it hard to focus and pay attention.
Distractions can be broadly categorised as external, task-related and internal distractions.
Internal distractions can often be the trigger that leads us to give in to external or task-related distractions.
Distractions are not villains but valuable sources of information. So, it is helpful to embrace them and look at them closely.
Once we are able to recognise and name our distractions, it becomes easier to tame them and find strategies that would help us manage them.
Next Step: Sign up for Being Sane, our weekly Sunday newsletter that provides actionable insights and tips on leading a saner work life.
“The best way to get anything done is to have a tight deadline,” said a friend’s husband when we were chatting about how to make progress on a long-term study assignment she had.
My friend had given herself a target of 12 months to achieve her goal – finish studying the course, do revisions, and take the certification exam. She had also timed it so that she would take the exam in March, which is examination time in India. Her child would be studying for her annual exams, and my friend thought this would be great to get her into the mindset of prepping for the exam.
My friend and her husband were discussing a very useful strategy for getting things done: setting a deadline.
Deadlines are great. They work well to get things done.
Most of us work well with deadlines. A client deliverable cut-off timelines that are not negotiable, like filing a tax return, catching a flight, or arranging a loved one’s birthday party. We do very well where it is painful to re-negotiate, or the consequences of missing the deadline are outside our window of tolerance.
But deadlines are also double-edged swords. If not handled carefully, we could end up killing ourselves with the sword.
So, how do we channel the power of deadlines while not overdoing it? Let’s find out.
The three things we’ll cover are
1. What makes deadlines work, and how is it related to biology?
2. The flipside of deadlines that leads to procrastination
3. How to harness the power of deadlines without overdoing it.
What makes deadlines work, and how is it related to biology?
World War I was one of the deadliest conflicts in history in the 20th century. Despite the gore and the brutality with which human lives were taken, there is a remarkable and heart-warming event that stands out.
On Christmas Eve, 1914, an event occurred along some parts of the Western Front. An unofficial, spontaneous truce in the form of a ceasefire happened on both fronts.
Initially, both sides were sceptical that a surprise attack by the other army would follow this.
But, as the evening set in, the British troops heard their German counterparts signing carols and patriotic songs. They even saw fir trees and lanterns set up along the German trenches.
Both armies exchanged messages and Christmas greetings across the trenches. One German soldier shouted, “Tomorrow you no shoot, we no shoot.” Thus, the truce was born.
The following day, on Christmas, British and German soldiers met in no man’s land, exchanged gifts, played football and took photographs.
British and German soldiers fraternising at Ploegsteert, Belgium, on Christmas Day 1914, Front of 11th Brigade, 4th Division.
Christmas Day was a temporal landmark that prompted the spontaneous truce on both sides.
Temporal landmarks are specific points in time, like Christmas Day, which serves as a mental marker. This marks a significant day or a fresh start that prompts people to make significant changes.
Deadlines are powerful temporal end-markers.
They establish a specific point in time, after which some significant change would have occurred. This spurs us to forward momentum, causing a series of biochemical changes in the body.
The brain activates the body’s flight-or-flight response to deal with the challenge or perceived threat in our way.
The anticipation of a reward at the end of the deadline increases dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with reward and motivation. Depending on how we perceive the task, cortisol is released, adrenaline surges and the sympathetic nervous system is activated, preparing the body to fight or flee. So, a whole load of chemical cocktails gets triggered in the body.
While working towards the deadline, our focus sharpens, our energy levels increase, and our bodies help us meet the deadline.
This is why we feel a rush, relief, or even euphoria when we meet deadlines.
This is the biological and neurological reason why deadlines are powerful.
Some of us can recognise this behaviour in the words we have used to describe ourselves, “I work really well under pressure.” Our bodies get primed for action, and deadlines are the markers that can be reached through action.
Apart from serving as temporal markers, deadlines also provide an important function of lending structure to your work and life.
Deadlines make it easy to structure, prioritise and organise your work.
You would have noticed this in your own life. The few days before an important deadline, you have no problems prioritising your work or life. All effort is geared towards making the massive push of action to get you to your deadline.
When there are time-bound deadlines, they lend structure to how you organise your work. If there is an important steering committee meeting at 2:30 pm every first Wednesday, you already know that the preparation for the meeting will take over Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Everything else goes to the back burner.
The flipside of deadlines
A few years back, I was suffering from allergies continuously for close to two years. I had to take an antihistamine every day to stop the sneezing attacks. I was bummed out and was ready to try anything to get these symptoms to diminish.
As part of an alternative treatment, it was found that I was allergic to potatoes! I loved potatoes. I was ‘programmed’ to make my body accept potatoes more readily, and for three days, I had to include potatoes in all my meals.
I was delighted. I was getting a chance to indulge in one of my favourite foods. On the first day, I made my favourite potato curry and rice. I thoroughly enjoyed my meal. I made different dishes using potatoes for the following two meals, and my excitement for potatoes steadily muted.
The next day, I wasn’t enthusiastic about making or eating potatoes. But it was part of the treatment, so with a lot of reluctance, I made potatoes and finished them with great difficulty.
On the third day, I was positively disgusted by potatoes. I was prepared to starve rather than touch a potato. Potatoes were now tiresome.
Too many deadlines can be like my love affair with potatoes – tiresome.
If you have deadlines coming at you one after the other, without a break, it can be more than tiresome—it can lead to burnout.
You have a car that can run at a maximum speed of 120 mph. But would you always drive your vehicle at that speed?
Of course not; you are probably saying this to yourself.
If you drive your car at top speed every time, the engine will overheat, the tyres will wear out faster, and your car will soon break down. It is also very likely that you do not get the same kick out of your vehicle when you occasionally run it at top speed.
If you depend only on the power of deadlines to get things done, enjoyable stress quickly turns into burnout stress. Our bodies are not always designed to handle the fight-or-flight response and its chemical cocktail. With a constant increase in adrenaline, the body produces a lot of cortisol, thereby reducing blood flow to the digestive system and other vital body functions needed for long-term survival. The body prioritises only short-term survival.
The flip side of always needing a challenge or deadline to get to work is that your brain will tire of the stress stimulation and increased dopamine production. It is like a drug addiction. Once you get addicted, you need more of the drug to produce the same rush.
Your brain gets used to the stimulation of rush and will need to produce more dopamine to generate the same rush, euphoria or sense of relief that comes from meeting the deadline. So, it urges you to act in a way that ensures it gets its steady supply of dopamine – it means it won’t let you rest or act when there is no pressure, aka deadline.
Some consequences of overdependence on deadlines are procrastination, loss of motivation, and not taking action if the stakes are not high enough.
These make deadlines a double-edged sword. As much as deadlines are needed to beat procrastination and inaction, they can also lead us into a vicious loop of causing procrastination and inaction.
So, how do we balance the advantages and disadvantages of deadlines and make it work for us?
How can we harness the power of deadlines without overdoing them?
There are three ways in which you can harness the power of deadlines without overdoing the impact on your body and brain.
1. Nip perfectionism in the bud
2. Create well-defined work blocks
3. Use the psychological power of the progress bar
Nip perfectionism in the bud
Perfectionism is one of the biggest enemies of getting things done. And every single one of us is a perfectionist at something.
Perfectionism also translates into procrastination. If you have deadlines to meet, you should park your perfectionist tendencies aside for another project or task.
When you are working towards a deadline, the biggest monster that will slow you down and grind you to a halt in the journey is a quest for perfectionism. This fallacy is palpable, especially if the deadline is in the distant future rather than in the here and now.
So, how do you nip perfectionism in the bud when working towards a deadline? You need to set a benchmark for what is good enough and what is perfect.
For example, when I put together a deck for a meeting, I would pull all the stops to ensure that I had all the information in hand before creating the final deck.
But over the years, I realised that the last few hours before the meeting were putting a lot of pressure on me as I waited for inputs to trickle down to me.
As an antidote to finishing this task, meeting the deadline and moving on with other tasks that would stall until I had completed this, I would create placeholders on the slide pack and say “Last Updated On: <<Date>>.
Surprisingly, the stakeholders didn’t often ask me why a few slides in the slide deck weren’t up to date. If asked, I’d say, “I am waiting for information on this and did not receive it when I pulled the deck together yesterday.”
Earlier, my perfectionist tendencies would have ensured that I was chasing down every single person who had to give me input, badgering them, or going on a hunt to find the information myself. Instead, I decided to chill and get onto other things by letting go of the need to have everything in place and leaving some things out of place.
This will save you time and energy, freeing up your mental bandwidth to focus on other things on your to-do list.
Creating well-defined work blocks in your schedule
Deadlines have a way of taking over your entire day and, if not most, of your productive working hours.
It would be great to harness the power of the deadlines to give us some steady motivation and progress towards our completion. One of the great ways to harness the dopamine rush and prevent the stress of the final push is to break down the final deadline into work blocks, each with its specific outcome.
For example, I have been writing this article for a few hours. I know I will feel relief when I am finally done with it, but the restlessness during the times between tasks makes it hard for me to focus on anything else.
So, I have chunked this task down into brainstorming, outlining, writing each section (500 words), editing and formatting.
Each work block has a defined time limit and completion criteria. I get a small but steady dopamine release, which lets me move from one task to another while getting towards my final deadline, with as little as is humanly possible while maximising my enjoyment of the process.
Scheduling these well-defined work blocks in your calendar and making them non-negotiable will ensure that you get into a rhythm with your work without making a herculean effort for every deadline.
Use the psychological power of the progress bar
Have you noticed the progress bar on your computer or any application?
The progress bar is so ubiquitous that we expect to see it everywhere. The progress bar gives us a sense of progress; it shows us that things are progressing (even if the download has inched up slowly from 9% to 10% after an eternity). It offers us a sense of predictability to know how much is completed and how much remains.
We can tap into the psychological power of the progress bar.
If our task is 100% and we should have completed it by our deadline, then we can assess our progress at the end of each significant work block or milestone or the end of an appropriate period (say, days or weeks).
Now, while writing these words, I know that I am 70% of the way into the article, and only 30% remains to be done. This gives me a sense of how far I have come and how far I need to go, which helps me maintain my energy and motivation on my way to completion.
You can document this % completion alongside your to-do list item or in your work block scheduled in your calendar.
Summary
So, to wrap up this article on harnessing the power of deadlines, here are the key points to take away.
Deadlines stimulate our body and brain into a state of readiness, focus and attention by priming it for fight and flight response.
Deadlines are a great way to get things done but are a double-edged sword.
Overuse of deadlines can lead to procrastination, burn out and inaction.
We can harness the power of deadlines without overdoing it by nipping perfectionism in the bud, creating well-defined time blocks and using the psychological power of the progress bar.
Next Step: Sign up for Being Sane, our weekly Sunday newsletter that provides actionable insights and tips on leading a saner work life.
