The Art of Productive Procrastination
On cluttered minds, endless dashboards, and the fear of starting
I have lost entire days inside Notion over the last few weeks.
Not mornings spent creating. Not afternoons spent doing the work I came here to do. Days spent building dashboards from scratch, arranging my days and weeks into perfect little tiles. A symptom tracker with charts. A content system with formulas that tell me exactly what needs to be done next. A weekly view that feels like a map of a life under control.
The more intricate the system, the more alive I feel. Every new roll-up that works, every link that connects to the right page, gives me a hit of satisfaction. My body hums with it. It’s like a low-grade electricity, buzzy, almost euphoric.
And it feels good. Necessary, even. I tell myself I’m making progress. I’m creating the foundation for everything else to flow. I’m preparing myself to be organized, to be ready, to finally take the work seriously.
Except at the end of those afternoons, there are no new words written. Just grids and categories and neatly built containers.
It’s one of the sneakiest traps I know: the work that looks like work but isn’t.
When clutter is a symptom
It’s not just Notion.
When my nervous system is buzzing too loudly, I find myself reaching for anything that can be tidied, sorted, or reordered. It doesn’t matter what it is. A junk drawer. My inbox. A kitchen cabinet.
Not long ago, I promised myself a slow day. I was going to rest. No lists, no screens, no pushing. But rest has never been simple for me. Within an hour, I felt anxious, restless, like I was crawling out of my own skin. So I stood up, walked into the kitchen, and began pulling everything out of the cabinets. Stacks of plates, mismatched mugs, spices I hadn’t used in years, spread across the counters like an inventory of my life.
I told myself I was just reorganizing. But really, I was trying to quiet the noise inside me.
Because that’s what productive procrastination is sometimes. A coping strategy. My mind feels too messy, so I create order outside of me. My nervous system screams for control, so I line up jars in perfect rows and decide where the olive oil should live.
For a little while, it works. My breathing slows. My body unclenches. There is relief in knowing exactly where to put things, when so much else feels impossible to hold.
But the relief doesn’t last. I can clean every cabinet and still be left with the same restless ache inside of me.
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The fear beneath it
Rearranging cabinets did calm me. The outer order gave me a sense of relief when the inside of me was too restless to sit still. That part is real. Sometimes productive procrastination is my way of self-regulating, of creating a little pocket of safety when my nervous system feels like it’s on fire.
But that’s not the whole story.
Because there are other times when the urge to organize isn’t about soothing at all. It’s about avoiding. It’s about circling the thing I want most but am afraid to touch.
This is the part that stings to admit: when I find myself deep in the loop of productive procrastination, it’s often because I’m afraid. Afraid that if I sit down to create, I won’t be good enough. Afraid that what comes out won’t match what I envisioned. Afraid that I’ll fail, or worse, prove the old voice inside me right, that maybe I was never meant to do this at all.
So I build systems around the work instead of entering it. I plan, polish, prepare. I sharpen the pencils but never use them. I scrub shelves instead of sitting with the blank page.
Both impulses can live inside the same act. Sometimes organizing soothes me. Sometimes it shields me. And the hardest part is telling the difference; learning to notice when I’m caring for myself, and when I’m just circling the edges of my own fear.
And it doesn’t only show up in creativity. We plan meals instead of cooking them. We buy new planners instead of changing our habits. We draft long messages instead of sending them. We clean the kitchen instead of sitting in the grief we don’t want to name.
These small, almost invisible detours reveal what we’re really up against. Sometimes it’s the buzzing nervous system begging for calm. Sometimes it’s fear whispering that we’re not ready, not capable, not enough. And sometimes it’s both at once.
When the system serves, and when it steals
I don’t believe organizing is the enemy. Systems and structure can be life-giving. A clean kitchen makes it easier to cook. A symptom journal can show patterns I might otherwise miss. A well-designed content tracker can keep me from losing threads that matter.
And I say this as someone who has built a life on systems.
I am a queen of systems and processes. For years, I made my living creating structures that helped businesses run more efficiently. I’ve designed workflows, built out operations, and mapped the kind of step-by-step procedures that keep entire companies from unraveling. I know how powerful a good system can be. It can save time, reduce chaos, and make the impossible feel manageable.
But that’s exactly why I have to be careful. Because the same gift that has served me so well can also turn against me.
Three hours spent fine-tuning a dashboard can be three hours stolen from creating. Emptying every cabinet in the kitchen might soothe me in the moment, but it also delays the deeper work of sitting with myself.
There’s a threshold that’s hard to name but easy to feel. The moment when preparation shifts from serving the work to stealing from it. I don’t always notice it in time, but when I do, it usually looks like this:
The task I’m doing starts to feel endless. There’s always another adjustment, another shelf to wipe, another formula to refine. I tell myself I’m almost finished, but the finish line keeps moving. That’s the signal I’ve crossed over. I’m no longer setting myself up to create; I’m avoiding creation itself.
This is where the practice comes in. Noticing when the system supports me, and when it’s keeping me in orbit. Asking, gently but directly:
Am I doing this to make the work easier, or am I doing this to keep from facing the work at all?
The culture of containers
My love of systems doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The world rewards it.
We live in a culture that worships productivity. Efficiency is treated like a virtue, busyness like a badge of honor. There are whole industries built around apps, planners, courses, and platforms that promise to optimize our lives. To make us faster, sharper, better.
It’s no wonder I leaned into it. Being the queen of processes made me valuable. It made me employable. It gave me identity and purpose. The more I streamlined and organized, the more people wanted from me. In many ways, systems saved me.
But here’s what culture doesn’t reward: the vulnerable act of actually creating. The slow, messy, imperfect work of making meaning. There are no easy checkboxes for that. No dashboards to prove progress.
And it’s not just about creativity. I see it in grief, too.
We make plans for how we’ll grieve instead of letting ourselves feel it. We create rituals around the edges, candles, playlists, and journals that sometimes become another kind of productive procrastination. A way to perform our grief instead of surrendering to it. A way to keep the loss contained, organized, and manageable, rather than admitting that it has undone us.
And so we circle the edges. We show off our systems because they look like success. A perfectly color-coded calendar is easier to post about than a half-finished draft. A spotless kitchen is easier to praise than an hour spent crying on the floor.
We confuse the container with the contents. We glorify the scaffolding while starving the structure itself.
The culture loves when we’re productive. But it rarely asks if the work we’re producing, whether art, rituals, or even our own lives, is honest, meaningful, or alive.
Choosing creation over circling
Writing this piece was its own act of resistance. I could have spent another morning polishing dashboards or rearranging cabinets. I could have kept circling the edges of what I wanted to say. Instead, I chose to sit here in the mess of it and create.
That doesn’t mean I won’t fall back into old patterns later this afternoon. I probably will. Because systems aren’t all bad. Sometimes they soothe me. Sometimes they protect me. But I’m learning to ask the deeper question: what is this moment asking of me? Do I need the comfort of order, or the courage to step into the work itself?
I don’t think we need to shame ourselves for the ways we cope. Organizing, planning, and building systems can be forms of care. But they can also become the thing we hide behind.
And maybe that’s the heart of it: learning to tell the difference.
Because there’s a world of difference between sharpening the pencil and actually writing with it. Between lighting the candle and letting ourselves cry. Between creating the container and finally pouring our lives into it.
So I’ll ask you: where do you find yourself productively procrastinating? And what might it be pointing to about your nervous system, your fears, or your longing right now?
Love today,
Heather 🌸
If this piece spoke to you, I’d love if you shared it with someone else who circles the edges of their own work. These words travel further when you carry them too.