Text from sketch
Productive procrastination
We are going to procrastinate.
That's the way our brains like to work.
No sense grumping about it, that'll just make it worse.
We might as well get better at it
This is a skill that takes practice,
so try to learn when the stakes are low.
- Have a good idea of what needs to be done
- Why? (Useful for motivation)
- What? (Including details, subtasks, prerequisites)
- By when?
- For how long? Estimating & tracking time helps with accuracy
- Choose procrastination wisely. A few good options:
- Something else that you needed to do anyway & that won't get in the way
- Something that resets your brain and helps you grow
- Something that builds up dopamine or manages energy
- sure, have a short video
- calming, energizing -> the zone
- Use timers
- so that your break doesn't stretch on
- and to make work feel more manageable
- I can do that for 5 minutes
- Celebrate! Pat yourself on the back even for small wins.
A+ is 8 (almost 9!) and is starting to learn how
to procrastinate. I think this is a fairly new
development now that she's got more classwork
and more ideas about how she wants to use her
time (not doing classwork). That's cool. I
procrastinate, too. Part of my job as her parent
is to help her learn how to procrastinate well,
and to let her practise while the stakes are low:
while she's dealing with schoolwork, instead of
when she's making critical life decisions on her
own.
This is hard for both of us, but mostly for me. I
keep getting the urge to try to keep her on track.
I have to remember that it doesn't work out if I'm
the one pushing. She resists. Also, she doesn't
get the practice in managing herself.
I think it'll work out better if I help A+ learn
to tune into and manage her energy. That might
look like 5-minute breaks and the occasional
snuggle, or reading during class and then catching
up on work. As she experiments, she'll get a
better sense of when she should pay attention and
do things at that moment because they're going to
use those things in a discussion or because the
opportunity isn't going to be available later.
There'll be failures along the way, like
underestimating how much time a task will take,
not managing energy well enough, or making the
wrong choices about attention–but that's just
feedback for the experiments. Failure is
low-stakes at the moment: a reminder from the
teacher if she hasn't gotten started on the class
activity, some negotiation about when to do things
if she ran out of energy the night before, a
worksheet we take our best guess at because we
don't know what the instructions were. She'll make
mistakes along the way, but that will help her
learn. As long as she gets the work done, that's
cool. And if she doesn't get the work done, then
that's an opportunity to debug and improve.
Her virtual school teachers are more on the
synchronous "everyone should be working on this
slide for the next ten minutes" side of things, so
we'll see how long we can get away with this
flexible approach. I hope eventually she'll get
the hang of getting the work done and then
reading, but that's probably something she's going
to figure out with experimentation.
It's great seeing A+ start to learn how to manage
herself. I made a menu of activities before, but
now she often thinks of activities herself. Earlier
in the schoolyear, she wanted the breaks to be
playing 20 minutes of Minecraft with me. Now we've
gotten that down to 10 minutes of Minecraft or
videos, and sometimes she even chooses 5-minute
breaks instead. She sets her own timers. Now that
we're experimenting with the Simply apps for
piano/singing/drawing, she sometimes uses that for
her break. Going through a bite-sized lesson or
practice session gives her energy and makes her
feel great about herself, especially if she's
picking a song like How Far I'll Go from Moana.
Sometimes A+'s breaks are a bit longer because she
wants to help out with something around the house,
like baking cookies. (It's funny how much her
motivation to help increases when there's a piece
of homework in front of her.) Practical life
skills are worth it too, and we talk about what
she gets out of those activities.
We also talk about dopamine levels and the effect
different activities have on our energy levels. We
talk about how things like music can shift how
we're feeling and help us get ready. She can tell
when she's ready, and she can tell when she's too
tired to work. (Goodness knows that getting better
at detecting when I'm in the negative productivity
zone is useful as a coder…)
Someday she'll be able to manage her own
checklists. In the meantime, I can help make lists
(and resist the temptation to add pressure to
them). Someday, all her breaks will be
self-regulated. In the meantime, if she wants
snuggles as a break, she gets them. Someday she'll
have a variety of breaktime activities that she
can use to manage her energy. In the meantime, I
can update the menu as her skills grow and her
interests evolve. Someday, she'll be able to work
longer and take shorter breaks, maybe something
like Third Time. In the meantime, it's okay to
start where she is. Someday she'll be in tune with
when she has the most energy in the day, and plan
her tasks accordingly. In the meantime, I can
share my observations. ("Hmm, we'll probably be
tired after we get back.") Someday, she might even
be able to strategically use procrastinating on
other tasks in order to get her main tasks done.
This is the time to experiment and learn.
One of the things that I appreciate about virtual
school is that her classwork gives her fodder for
practising the skill of figuring out how to get
things done. Sure, the skills and bits of
knowledge she develops by doing it are handy, but
she can learn that whenever. The process of
getting stuff done (including things you might not
particularly enjoy doing, but which need to be
done anyway)–now that's a generally useful
thing. If we choose to homeschool, I'll probably
want to come up with something similar so that she
can keep practising.
Speaking of feedback, I wonder how I can make
something that'll help us estimate and then track
how much time a task actually takes, without
feeling the pressure of a count-down timer or a
missed goal. I occasionally track my time on tasks
using Org Mode effort estimates and clocking, and
I like to approach it with curiosity instead of
stress. My tasks are usually not repetitive, so
it's more about calibrating my sense of effort. It
might be interesting to help her start developing
that sense too. She's already used to timers on
her watch. This is more of a stopwatch thing, but
maybe something less frenetic than a digital
stopwatch or a Stackmat timer. Or we could use her
timer and then treat it as a check-in reminder…
I don't think she's quite there yet, but it could
be something to try later on. Something to grow
into.
On my side, I'm working on staying focused on our
long-term goals. It's not about making sure this
particular thing gets done now. It's about helping
A+ develop ownership of the process and the
ability to tune into herself: her interests, her
energy levels, her decisions and experiments. I'm
also here to help build her up by catching her
doing well and celebrating those small wins. It's
very tempting to try to use pressure and stress
when I feel responsible for helping her develop a
work ethic that's convenient for fitting in, but
maybe there are other things that could work well
for us. Practising letting her work it out–even
if it means the occasional failure–will be
important as she gets older and more independent,
so I might as well learn that while the stakes are
low, too.
It's easier to work with what we've got than to
grump at ourselves for not being who we wish we
were. It's like the way I've been learning to work
with how my brain works, too. Our brains
procrastinate. We can get better at doing it.
Could be fun.
Does your brain tend to procrastinate too? What do
you find works well for you?
