Are You Procrastinating Inside Your Productivity?

As an executive coach who focuses on women’s empowerment, one of the things I hear constantly from women is that they want to be more “productive.”

Usually, when a woman tells me about how much better her life would be if she were “just more productive” she already has a packed calendar, a long list of accomplishments, and an even longer to-do list. 

“But really,” they often insist, “I could be doing so much more … and I really should be.” 

Being productive is important, but as the old adage goes: too much of a good thing is a bad thing, and productivity is no exception. That’s why I want to ask you a question and I’m asking you to be honest with yourself when you answer it:

Are you procrastinating inside your productivity? 

It’s ironic, I know, to procrastinate inside our longing to be more productive, but it’s also really convenient—especially for high-performing women at work. 

That’s because it allows us to hide out from some other really big and scary stuff we don’t want to deal with—and it’s a particularly convenient hideout too, since to-do lists and inboxes can never really get to zero for more than a moment in time. Productivity is one of the few things in life we can never max out, which is part of what can make it such an insidiously bad habit.

Studies have long shown that the more efficient and productive we are at work, the more we fill our time with, you guessed it, more work.

Studies have long shown that the more efficient and productive we are at work, the more we fill our time with, you guessed it, more work. We find ourselves trapped on the hamster wheel of overflowing to-do lists, inboxes and calendared commitments, working harder and faster to get more done—often crossing things off our list at the expense of using our limited time to do the things that truly make us most fulfilled and impactful.

This vicious cycle provides a convenient (and sneaky) way to procrastinate inside our productivity. Here are three reasons I often see women hide from inside their so-called productivity:  

1) Hiding out from how overwhelmed you are by your to-do list: Wait, you’re trying to tell me when I’m overwhelmed by my to-do list that I add more to it? This was my reaction when I read “Time Smart,” the latest book by Dr. Ashley Whillans of Harvard Business School, an organizational psychologist who studies the relationship between how we use our time and our happiness. As Dr. Whillans explains: 

“When we feel time poor, we take on small, easy-to-complete tasks because they help us feel more control over our time. We think, There. Made a protein shake and finished that errand. I’m getting stuff done! In this case, it’s a false sense of control that doesn’t alleviate the root cause of our busyness.” 

Instead of finding ways to pare down our calendars, commitments and to-do lists, we hide from the hard work of making that lifestyle change by taking on more (often meaningless) things we can check off as “small wins.” The result is a to-do list that only grows longer, often triggering more stress and keeping us trapped in a vicious cycle of procrastination inside our productivity.   

2) Hiding out from our perfectionism: Years ago I worked with a client named “Emma” who was an extraordinary tactician. There’s just no other way to describe her: there was truly nothing Emma couldn’t execute with excellence inside her large, national non-profit. 

Emma had ideas about ways the organization’s mission could be more impactful for their stakeholders and about how a reorganization of the staffing plan could support critical programs and save money, but she was scared to share her ideas because they weren’t “fully-fleshed out.”

So she hid out inside her productivity: instead of carving out time to brainstorm and get creative, she focused on packing and executing this week’s to-do list. She’d get to this big idea stuff next week when she “had time.” 

As my friend and mentor Claire Wasserman notes in her book “Ladies Get Paid,” the tendency to burrow in our overworking and obsess over our productivity is all about our fear of judgement. As Claire notes about a client named “Kate” who was just like Emma:

“She was cocooning herself away with the most minor details so as to avoid the real work and the potential judgement that goes along with it … Because her hard work usually paid off—and because of the rush she got from the sense of achievement and the approval of other that came with it—Kate could never seem to get off the hamster wheel of overworking.” 

I can tell you this has long been my personal kryptonite. Alongside Kate and Emma, I know we’re not alone. 

3) We’re hiding out from finding out what actually makes us happy. On many occasions I’ve had women come to coaching and tell me that they don’t know what they want to do with their life. The problem isn’t their uncertainty, they swear. This, they insist, is the most important thing in their life. If they could just be more productive at their current jobs, they’d have time to figure it out. 

In “Time Smart,” Whillans calls our bluff on this bad habit, “We keep ourselves overwhelmed in the hopes that this busyness will provide us fulfillment. Ironically, perpetual busyness undermines the goals that we set out to achieve with our busyness in the first place.” 

It’s counterintuitive, but sometimes we’re so overwhelmed by the overwhelm of not knowing what we want that we can’t even engage with it. Keeping ourselves too busy to think about it is the equivalent of driving to McDonald’s tonight because you’re starting the diet tomorrow. 

Is being productive a bad thing? Of course not. But one thing I do ask my clients every time they tell me they want to be more productive is: 

Do you want to be productive or do you want to be impactful? 

So far, nobody has ever chosen the former. Most of us think our productivity makes us impactful, but they are actually different things. Consider the difference between:

• Must complete my to-do list (productive) vs. Must do the things that matter (impactful) 

• Must do it all (productive)  vs. Must do it well (impactful) 

• Must do it myself (productive) vs. Must make a plan to ensure execution (impactful)

When we hang out inside impactful—doing the things that matter—there’s a lot less room to hide out and procrastinate. Bonus points: you also do better work that you feel better about.

So are you going to be impactful or productive today? Shoot me a note and let me know.

Randi Braun is an executive coach, consultant, speaker and the founder of Something Major.