Cheap Productivity: Procrastination in Disguise

How much did you get done today? How much of it helped you progress your long-term goals?

How much did you get done today? How much of it helped you progress your long-term goals?  

Being “too busy” is one of the most common excuses people offer for failing to progress the projects that most deeply matter to them—writing a book, learning an instrument, launching a business, producing videos, and so on. Advancing those kinds of projects can be hugely daunting—it takes a mountain of time and effort to complete them, not to mention the risks if the projects fail. 

Our anxiety about the effort and risks involved can lead us to procrastinate, which makes us feel unproductive and guilty. But there’s a particularly insidious form of procrastination that enables us to evade that guilt and gives us the perfect excuse for not moving on our big project. I call it “cheap productivity.”

Cheap productivity is when we do a task that, although useful and productive, enables us to put off some more important or daunting task. Often, it takes the form of relatively easy, minor pieces of work such as answering emails or tidying the house, but it can be virtually anything that’s easier and offers a faster reward than the task you’re putting off. 

To avoid falling into the cheap productivity trap, it’s helpful to apply the so-called “Eisenhower Matrix,” a process for prioritizing tasks often attributed to President Eisenhower and popularized by self-help author Stephen Covey. The basic idea is to separate tasks according to both urgency and importance, so you end up with four categories:

Important and urgent Important and not urgent

Not important and urgent Not important and not urgent

Unfortunately, we tend to feel much more motivated by a task’s urgency than by its importance. We fill our lives with urgent tasks, some of which are important, and others of which feel important but are merely urgent and could be left undone or passed off to someone else without much consequence. Meanwhile, the really important but not urgent tasks—long-term goals that have no immediate reward or cost for failure but upon which our future success and happiness depend—fall by the wayside.

We only have limited time in our lives. With healthy sleep patterns (which are essential to making the best use of our waking time), we get sixteen hours each day. In that time, we need to do all our essential survival tasks (earning money, buying and preparing food, cleaning our homes, paying bills, and so forth), as well as progress our long-term goals and leave ourselves time to rest and relax. That’s all we have: 467,000 hours in an 80-year life. How much have you used up already? 

We can either use our time on the important things or the unimportant things—there simply isn’t time to do both. If you want to succeed, you can’t afford to waste time on cheap productivity. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that make-work is a fit substitute for real progress on your goals.

If you want a flourishing future in which you can look back on life goals achieved and enjoy the new opportunities and challenges those will bring, prioritize the things that really matter today. It’ll mean letting some less important things slide, and it’ll mean accepting some delayed gratification, but the rewards will one day far outstrip anything a quick bit of cheap productivity can achieve.