Be more efficient when working

I have one little trick pertaining to this topic that may be worth sharing, or maybe it’s just my personal foible.

So, I have a childish resistance to working on what I am supposed to be working on. I am very driven and productive doing almost anything else besides the top to-do. It’s like there’s some part of me that needs to ‘get away with’ that behavior.

However, the things I’m not supposed to be doing can be very useful in themselves, even to the extent of having some actual relation to paying work (!) The part of me that needs to ‘get away with’ procrastination is not very clever. By playing off sets of tasks against each other - intentionally choosing what’s absolutely, positively top priority, knowing that I will proceed to immediately and guiltily ignore that item - I can fool myself into being motivated to do all sorts of things I really want/ought to do anyway.

I am made slow by a retarculous over-abundance of ideas.

When I turn my attention to any single task or project, I usually get pretty quick results. But as I begin to really set in to work on something, I get another huge burst of ideas, so I feel like I at least have to pause to write them down before they slip away. Then the act of writing down ideas itself generates another burst of ideas. That cycle doesn’t continue indefinitely of course, eventually I calm down again, but then I am very far away from whatever I was originally working on.

For a long time I thought this was a sign of being really creative and smart. But over time (years, really—it takes so long to recognize even basic things about myself) two patterns slowly emerged:

1) I am pretty sure that part of this “creative” mechanism is just thinly-disguised work avoidance. The “Muse” strikes especially hard when I am stuck on a problem. It’s always so much easier to get excited about something new, than it is to do the remaining 50% to 95% of the hard work necessary to finish something off.

2) I’ve realized that, just personally speaking, “creative” has _ to mean actually _creating something! And creating something has to mean actually finishing it, at least to a state where it can be at least minimally used or appreciated by someone else.

If other people don’t use or appreciate what I’m doing, it’s just so much procrastination and self-absorption in the end. (Again, here I’m just articulating a necessary guideline for me, I don’t presume to make ringing pronouncements about what “you people” need to do.)