Einstein, Allie Brosh, and the Secret to Procrastinating With Style


When you contemplate your life, wondering what it means to be alive, it’s unlikely the first thing that came to mind was ‘office work.’

And yet arguably the life you lead at your desk inhabits a great deal of mental real estate. The sheer number of hours typically spent at work guarantees that the office and all it entails is fundamental in understanding and explaining the big picture of your life.

Work may or not bring out the best of us, depending on our tasks and whether we are able to get into flow as defined by Csikszentmihalyi. But observation suggests there is one constant in human behavior you can expect to see wherever you find a shantytown of office cubicles.

The idea was coined by Allie Brosh, of Hyperbole and a Half fame. In a recent interview with Terry Gross, Brosh explained how she started her now-famous internet comic when she was supposed to be studying for finals: “I'm laterally productive. I will do productive things, but never the thing that I'm supposed to be doing.”

The elegance of lateral productivity is it allows you to put off tasks indefinitely without guilt. After all, you aren’t loafing around accomplishing nothing. You’re working hard! You don’t have time to file those reports.

It’s Einstein’s theory writ small: two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time. In this case, two tasks can’t occupy the same brain space, since the human brain is notoriously poor at multi-tasking.

Lateral productivity allows you to play the hero to your self-imposed task villain.  You find yourself in a kind of self-perpetuating state of activity, trapped in some Escheresque landscape where you’re diligently drawing the next set of stairs right before you ascend or descend said stairway. Technically, you’re moving, but there’s no forward progress to be had.

This art form is practiced by workers and managers alike. Lateral productivity can go by many other aliases, including “special side project”. The naming lends a measure of credibility. Throw in some metrics, build some color graphs, wrap it up in a Power Point presentation and you’ve got the makings of an entirely new task, which at some point lateral productivity will force you to abandon for something else.

Perhaps the best spokesman for lateral productivity was the great New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra. Driving around one day, unsure of his location or the route to his destination, he reported, “We may be lost, but we’re making great time.”


Check out Robb’s new book and more 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more