the biggest procrastination machine of all time…

It is easy to see when you procrastinate, right?

You have something to do, and you spend time playing videogame, or watching YouTube, or scrolling on social media…

You feel bad at the end of the day…
Feel like you accomplished nothing…

This is the easy procrastination…

I always though that YouTube and social media those the biggest procrastination machines of all time…

Yet… There is another type of procrastination…
That led me to discover an even bigger procrastination machine!

You see… The worse procrastination is…

When you actually do something valuable!

You need to deliver a project, and then…
You spend the day fixing security bugs…
Or improving the documentation…
Or implementing new tests…

All good things on their own merit…
And maybe even part of the plan for the project…

Yet…
Not the priority things you have to do!

This is VERY easy to happen when you are a beyond senior professional, with lots of autonomy…
Or… When, like me, you are an entrepreneur… with even more autonomy…

You have to make sales… Or negotiate with someone…
And that is annoying…
So…
You go fix the website…
Or post on LinkedIn…
Write an article…

Again… Valid things…
Just not the most important things for you to do…

I'm seeing more and more this type of procrastination that even I fell into… because of what may be the biggest procrastination machine of all time…

GenAI.

A developer told me a few months ago:

"All those projects that I wanted to do in the past,
and that I never finished,
I'm now working on them with GenAI!"

Wow! That is amazing!
(I said)
And then I asked:

I bet they are very cool projects!
Something to advance your career?

And… He was a little embarrassed…
Because…
None of the projects really mattered…
They were old ideas, and things he never finished that now are mostly irrelevant…
Even the ones that were interesting and cool… were more distractions than anything he could benefit from if he really got them done…

Yet…
He was exited and thinking that it was all amazing!
Because he felt like he was doing SOMEthing…

I got sucked into a rabbit hole like that myself…
Started doing some interesting projects…
And suddenly, I'm spending hours adding features, and coming up with ideas, and staying up late at night…

And…
Look…
Those may even be good things on their own merit…
Yet…
They are not the most important things for me to do…
Not the things that get my career moving…
Or that bring value to my business…

You know what?

This is top procrastination at work!

When I looked around… There were so many things I was NOT doing…

Again…
The worse procrastination is the one that looks useful…
The one that you feel you are doing something…

But… In the end of the day… You feel tired…
Yet… When you think about it…
You accomplished nothing.

So…
I've already considered GenAI an amazing slot machine, always incentivizing you to do one more prompt… to spend a few more tokens…

Now… I realize it is also an amazing procrastination machine…

To not fall on that trap?
Make sure you have a lot of clarity in your plans.

Because you will have a lot more results…
(and will procrastinate a lot less…)
once you have clarity on where you want to get.

And my goal is that you have the most amazing results in the industry!

I share daily career insights to help you keep that clarity… subscribe here:
https://code4.life

Cheers,
Bruno.
The "Procrastinating Again" Man