How to use strategic procrastination to spend less time on email and other low leverage tasks
Plus only one reference to chocolate (showing self-restraint!) and a rare mention of dogs rather than cats (cat content to resume in future newsletters)
Hello and welcome to Academia Made Easier. I am so glad that you are here.
Recently, I posed a question to #AcademicTwitter: what is your top time management challenge these days? The winner, hands down: procrastination. Almost half of the (completely non-scientific, unrepresentative, just-for-fun) poll respondents selected this option.
Many people feel procrastination is a problem to be solved. Minimize distractions, we are told. Do it now! Eat that frog!
This doesn’t work for me. I love distractions. “Now” is not always a good time for me. And if I eat a frog, it better be made out of chocolate.
I suggest a different approach: embrace procrastination. In my experience, procrastination is a secret productivity weapon. The trick is to learn how to procrastinate strategically. Let me explain.
You are likely already familiar with the idea of the Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, which is the idea that 20% of our effort produces 80% of our results. Academics will naturally be inclined to push back (“It isn’t 80% of the results, it is 74.6%.”; “What journal was this published in?”). But it is hard to argue with the basic notion that some efforts are higher leverage and produce more significant results than others.
Strategic procrastination is the practice of deliberately delaying low leverage actions.
Doing things too early is often inefficient, and creates the potential for low leverage tasks to be done at an effort level above what they merit. Work expands to the time available, as they say, so my goal is to shrink the time available for low leverage actions. Not everything deserves my A-game.
An example from my own experience: lecture prep. My teaching style is a mix of short lectures and applied learning, and I often use slide decks in my teaching. As I despise text-dense slides, I include a lot of images.
When I started teaching I would look for “perfect” images. Two minutes of searching would quickly become eight. For a single 20 slide lecture, this meant that my lecture prep time was often extended by a good two hours just looking for images. This was on top of the two hours (or more) for prepping the actual content of the lecture.
With a teaching load of two classes per semester, with two sessions of each class each week, you can see the problem. (4 hours prep per lecture * 4 classes per week = 16 hours lecture prep.) I would rationalize it to myself (“I will reuse these slides in the future! This is an investment of time.”). But as a tenure-track mom trying to balance teaching with research and publishing, completing my share of university service, making dinners, and taking my kids to swim and music lessons, it was exhausting.
The solution I found was to strategically procrastinate, leaving lecture prep to the afternoon of the day before class. When I started doing this, I made some shocking discoveries. Student learning was not affected by my less-than-perfect slide images. I could cut my lecture prep time in half and it had no impact on the quality of my teaching, on my student evaluations, or the quality of my students’ work students.
The return on my time “investment” had been close to nil.
This example may not resonate with you at all. But it is likely the case that there are some low leverage tasks in your daily life that you could start delaying to good effect.
To try strategic procrastination out, here is one small idea for you to try immediately … or whenever you want to get around to it.
One Small Thing to Try Immediately: The End of Day Email Blitz
As so many of us strive for the temporary bliss known as Inbox Zero, it is easy to forget that email is a means to an end (communication) and not an end in itself. There is no CV category for timely email responses. For most university roles (and I exclude some frontline staff positions here), while some individual emails pertain to high leverage activities, the vast majority of emails do not.
If we apply the 80-20 rule, we can assume that 20 out of 100 emails deserve your timely attention. Deal with those 20 in a timely manner. The other 80 emails? Those are great candidates for strategic procrastination.
Here are three easy steps to make this work for you.
Create an email folder titled “0. End of Day Email Blitz”. (The zero is to put it at the top of your email folder list.)
Over the course of the workday, whenever you check email, review them quickly and ask yourself the following question, “Does this need an immediate response or can it wait until the end of the day?” Any email that requires an immediate response gets one. Any email that does not really require an immediate response gets dragged to the new folder. (Note: this will be hard. Suck it up and do it anyways. You will survive. Trust me.)
Take 30 minutes at the end of the workday and blitz through as many of these emails as possible. Leave the rest for your next end of workday email blitz. (Again: You will survive.)
This small practice will make a huge difference in your workday. Here are just a few of the reasons why:
Some of the emails will resolve themselves without you. Over the course of the day, others may respond to group emails, removing your need to respond entirely. (Delete!) People who emailed you as a way to avoid putting their own effort into a task may grow impatient enough to do their own work and find what they need on their own through a quick Google search or similar small effort, allowing your response to be a simple “glad you resolved this.” (A favourite example from my own life: a student emailed me in the morning with a question, and then again in the afternoon to tell me that he found the answer himself. Where? In the syllabus. Of course.)
It is more efficient. You can batch certain emails, reducing cognitive load and speeding up your email processing time. Sending 10 emails saying “thanks - got it” using a cut-paste response at the end of the day is far more efficient than having those same emails dispersed over the day.
The email folder serves as a “cooling” space. It can prevent you from agreeing to requests too quickly (tip: use the Thanks but No Signature to efficiently respond to those emails). It can also give you enough emotional space to err on the side of compassion in your responses. Both of these will save you a lot of time in the long run, and Future You will be grateful.
Delaying email responses creates more potential for focused work time. Constant interruptions are a huge challenge for academic work. Limiting time during the workday spent on email creates space for focused work.
The single hardest part about implementing the End of Day Email Blitz idea is self-discipline. Responding to email, even the 80% of emails that are low leverage, can feel very rewarding. I encourage you to try the idea for a full week. I suspect you will find it to be a game-changer.
I have a lot more to say about how to stop procrastinating on high leverage activities (particularly writing), how to manage email, and how to create space for focused work. I will be addressing these topics in future newsletters. Watch this space!
Chipping Away: What I Have Been Up To
A quick update on some of my own recent and upcoming activities since my last newsletter, since I have your attention:
I have a new canine running partner and I could not be more thrilled. Hank lives next door, runs 6K easily, and shares my apprehension of Canada geese. Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
This June I will be co-facilitating the Centre for Higher Education Research and Development’s Heads and Chairs: Leading Academic Departments intensive online workshop. Be sure to enroll if you are a current or soon-to-become department leader looking for strategies to lead effectively while modelling work-life balance. Department leadership is critical to the success of universities and I enjoy the opportunity to work directly with department chairs and heads and assistant and associate deans to help them achieve their goals.
I have two research assistants (one graduate student and one undergraduate student) working with me this summer. Their energy, curiosity, and professionalism inspire me, and I am yet again reminded how privileged I feel to do the work I do.
Until next time…
I would like to extend my thanks to those of you who have been sharing this newsletter with your networks. My goal with this newsletter is to highlight small ideas, many of which I have learned the hard way, to make academic work easier. I believe strongly in the academic mission and the roles of higher education, research and discovery in creating a better future. I also believe that the wellness of everyone working in academia matters to achieving that vision. When I see growing numbers of subscribers, website readers, and social media shares, I feel hopeful that others feel the same.
Stay well, my colleagues.
PS. You are still here? I love that about you. Please comment on the Substack page and tell me about a low leverage task that you either already strategically procrastinate on or that you would like ideas for how to deal with. I look forward to hearing from you!
Loleen Berdahl, PhD: I am a twin mother, wife, runner, cat lover, and chocolate enthusiast. I spend far too much time on Twitter and binge-watching television, and my house could be a lot cleaner. During the work hours, I am the Executive Director of the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy. I am the author of University Affair’s Skills Agenda column and my most recent books are Work Your Career: Get What You Want from Your Social Sciences or Humanities PhD and Explorations: Conducting Empirical Research in Canadian Political Science.