Procrastination and Pondering

My colleague Charlie asked an interesting question in his post on “Window Watching – Space for My Brain“:

As we continue to move towards a 24/7 online, adhocracy based work style (not sure where the lifestyle fits in).  It is important that information workers recognise the need for creating effective brain-only time.  I think there needs to a cultural shift in thinking that downtime (time away) from our connected/online work environments is valuable and useful.

It has me wondering how procrastination fits into this… as Graham has blogged about here in the category My Brain Topic.

I think that the difference between procrastination and “effective brain-only time” is the difference between procrastination and pondering. These two things are different, in my opinion:

• Procrastination are the times when you are filling your time with anything and everything just to avoid doing something. The only thing that you are thinking about is the thing that you really should be doing, but you are avoiding doing it by doing all manner of other things.
• Pondering is when you are doing nothing, or at least nothing that requires your brain to be in process mode. Pondering is something that is very important and can be done in many different ways.

Personally I have two main ways that I ponder; walking, free journaling.

One of the main reasons that I go for a walk in a morning is to ponder. Sometimes I listen to a podcast, but most of the time I walk to ponder.

I also try to free journal. To free journal you sit down with a piece of paper and write whatever it is that you are thinking about. There should be no structure to the writing, no grammar checking, no spell checking, no sense checking, just writing. As I write I find that thoughts spark other thoughts. I don’t analyse them I just write them down. As the words are put onto the paper it’s like they are released from spinning around my head and make room for another thought.

I always free journal with paper because there is no technology to tell me I have done anything wrong and no way of going back and changing something.

This type of free expression is apparently very good for the brain.

A study was undertaken with older people who were asked this question: “If you had it to do over again, what would you do differently?” and the answers:

• Risk more.
• Reflect more.
• Do more things that would live on after I died.

I think that reflecting and pondering are quite similar.

(My procrastination busting was successful and I managed to get the document finished.)