Side quests and quasi-work

How often do you find yourself doing quasi-work?

You know what it is. It’s the kind of activities that kinda sorta look like work, under the right lighting -but not quite.

They are usually distractions from your main work, side quests, and detours that delay the inevitable: you have work to do. And this is especially pressing when working from home. Home is where the heart is, but it is also where all these distractions live. There’s so many things at home that can send us on a side quest.

Home is where the heart is, but it’s also where all these distractions live.

I think I have always been somewhat aware of this pattern, but it became more evident when I observed the behavior of my son (7) when having to do something he doesn’t want to do right then.

For example, when it’s time to go take a shower, to start his go-to-bed routine, he seems to find lots of distractions:

• “I just want to finish this episode, look, it’s JUST 5 minutes”
• “yeah, yeah, I am going, I just need to stretch (for 5 minutes)”
• “Oh, look a fire truck just went by!”
• etc.

And when it’s time to do his homework, this is how it usually goes:

• He sharpens his pen, then drops it on the floor, which breaks the tip and means he has to sharpen it again
• He gets thirsty so he gets himself a glass of water, then he has to use the restroom because he had so much water
• He remembers and starts to recount something that happened at school today (although when we asked him earlier, he said he did “nothing” at school, he learned “nothing” and he ate “nothing” for lunch).
• He remembers and starts to recount a funny scene from a movie that we watched last night, which prompts the need to watch it again
• When you remind him that he is supposed to be doing homework, he gets angry and storms out into his bedroom until he calms down (to be fair, sometimes he takes the homework with him and comes back with most of it complete)
• The show goes on until it has taken him about 45 minutes to do 10 minutes worth of homework

Does it sound familiar? It’s almost as if?distractions were hard-coded into our brains…

There’s SOME value in distractions, though.

It is interesting, however, that not all of these distractions are completely devoid of value.

OK, sometimes we binge-watch a show on Netflix and we justify it as “I just need to relax and not think for a bit”. While everybody needs a break sometimes, there’s not much value creation happening there, really. ??

But other times we go for a run to avoid studying. And both studying and exercising are healthy, desirable behaviors.

(Sometimes I write this kind of article instead of doing other work. But hey, it helps me offload the idea that triggered the article, instead of having it bouncing around the back of my mind all day, keeping me distracted. And I have something valuable that I can post and share with the community. So that’s a good thing, right? Right?)

Another curious consideration is that sometimes the same activity can be one that we run towards -or away from, depending on the circumstance. We could as easily doom-scroll on social media until it’s too late to go to the gym as we could go to the gym to avoid studying for that dreaded exam or working on that challenging report, etc

So it’s not JUST about the activity itself, it’s also about the context of priority that is assigned to the activity: is it the main one, or the escape? Is it what we have to do or what we get to do?

The biggest problem with this pattern of distraction and procrastination is that the priority is not assigned intentionally and that it is part of?a lie that we tell ourselves?to protect our fragile egos when it comes to deciding how to allocate time. We know we are wasting time, and we know it’s not the most efficient use of our time right now. And yet…

Ask yourself why you’re deviating from the plan

One useful self-awareness technique I have identified to deal with them is to ask the following questions:

• What exactly am I doing right now?
• What is my justification for doing it RIGHT NOW (as opposed to later)?
• What task was I doing immediately before?
• What is the main task that I SHOULD be doing today that I am postponing because “I just have to do this first”?
• Am I running away from it? Why?
• What scary/undesirable activity or unwanted result am I trying to postpone by procrastinating?
• Based on the above, what action should I actually be taking instead right now?

That exercise brings me back on track helps me regain ownership of my actions and my priorities, and helps me become more intentional about not just what I am doing right now, but also about the patterns of my actions. As I become a more insightful spectator of myself, I learn to recognize the type of situations and distractions that are likely to send me on these distracting errands, and then build healthier environments that reinforce and reward desirable behaviors, while at the same time discouraging unwanted behaviors.

That is, making desirable behaviors:

• Obvious
• Attractive
• Easy
• Satisfying

And, through the inversion of the above, making unwanted behaviors:

• Invisible
• Unattractive
• Difficult
• Unsatisfying

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading?“Atomic Habits”?by James Clear (from which the above 4 laws and their inversions were extracted) and?“Indistractable” by Nir Eyal . They are both easy reads chuck-full of tools and immediately applicable advice to improve your productivity.

What’s my own process for writing?

With my articles, what I do is to take a timed 10 minutes to dump the core ideas into my notebook until I can schedule some intentional time later in the week, to write this idea into an article (or at least to advance it enough so I can finish it in the next session).

(Note: The next step in my evolution of this approach is doing some research to understand what’s my prime time for writing and make sure I have some weekly allocation scheduled for it at the right hour of the day, so I can take at least one of my article ideas and develop it over one or more blocks of time of specified duration.)

Enjoying what you’re reading? I’ve really enjoyed writing it!

Follow me on Medium (https://medium.com/@hernan.chiosso) for more.