I promised a post on productivity when I resumed writing last month, but as I’ve been gathering notes and writing drafts I’ve realised that it’s a really huge topic, and probably better treated in chunks. I’m starting here because procrastination is one of the most serious common roadblocks to productivity - no matter how robust your task-tracking methods or efficient your “inboxes”, if you regularly balk at certain tasks then progress is impossible.

So what are we up against?

Procrastination has one major root cause - fear. There are many sources of fear; some (fear of death, fear of pain) are hard-wired into all of us; others (fear of embarassment, fear of inconvenience, fear of failure) are learned responses to past conditions. All fears originate in the subconscious, and herein lies the problem.

Our subconscious has a highly vivid imagination - it’s always looking out for the wildest, worst scenario that could befall us, and steering us clear. Sometimes that’s good - it’s what stops us accepting rides home with drunks and playing with matches. Other times, it’s disastrous, holding us back from speaking in public, paying a bill or asking that cute stranger if they fancy a coffee. Our subconscious, designed to keep us safe from harm, has a hard time differentiating between Real Harm (certain death) and Not Actually Harm (”sorry, I’m dating someone”).

The very thing which makes us human - the ability to spot patterns, imagine scenarios and weigh up alternatives - can be a crippling burden if left in the control of the subconscious. Luckily, all those things also combine to afford us a defence against ourselves - rationality.

Fighting fear with rationality takes some practice, but it’s a useful skill to have. Training yourself to fight your subconscious knee-jerk reaction against getting something done provides you with a better chance of fighting stronger, more primally-driven fears (fear of flying, or spiders, or clowns).

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I just caught myself doing something extremely odd; something that I’ve done habitually for years. It’s in the general class of little quirks which we tend to notice especially in generations older than us. I suspect that’s because the original underlying cause of their habit is obscured by time and “progress” and made to seem all the more out-of-place as a consequence.

My specific quirk concerns those plastic rings which hold together multipacks of cans and bottles. Whenever I’m about to dispose of one, I always take a pair of scissors and snip through every closed loop in the plastic so that none of them are joined together. I can remember very clearly why I do this, although I couldn’t tell you when it started.

At some point in the past, I heard a story about scavenger birds (seagulls and the like) who were getting their heads caught in the loops of plastic can-holders and then slowly choking themselves to death. I believe that the story specifically mentioned cutting the loops apart to avoid their suffering. I wouldn’t class myself as a rampant “animal lover” exactly, but something about the story hit home. Et voila, many years later I find myself standing in my kitchen cutting up plastic rings. Each time I do it, I remember the original story and ponder its veracity, even as I snip snip snip away.

The really crazy thing is that I then hopefully deposit the plastic in with the recycling, telling myself “well, I snipped it in case they reject and landfill it regardless.”

I fully expect, many years from now, to be standing in some kitchen snipping away whilst incredulous offspring or offspring-offspring (should such people ever exist) ask me “why the heck are you doing that?”

“Seagulls, dear. Seagulls.”

I’m not even particularly fond of seagulls…