Good morning. Hello from New York City.

Today, I want to talk about something my friend Eric and I used to say to each other. We’ve always talked a lot about business, as we were both building our businesses at the same time. We talk about client development, operations, our employees and these types of matters. We also talk about using downtime to prepare for uptime. That’s a reference to the periods that are a little bit dry – when you ain’t got much happening – and how to make the best use of that time instead of focusing on the fact that the phone isn’t ringing. The other one is productive procrastination. For many years, I thought that one of us had coined the term productive procrastination, but that’s not the case. It’s been around for quite some time.

What I mean by productive procrastination is this. It’s when you’re doing everything but that one thing that you really need to do and you can’t put off any longer yet you are. If you’re in school, it would be getting started on writing your essay or studying for an exam. Instead of your school work, maybe you’re doing the dishes or cleaning your room up or making a list of things to do, filing away your paperwork, whatever it is. Productive procrastination is when you are doing a lot of things except for the thing that you really feel like you should be doing. By using this term, I shifted away from feeling guilty all the time, or self-flagellating unnecessarily. So it’s one thing to be lazy and do nothing and it’s quite another to use your energy to do something that may not be the thing, but that is still productive.

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