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by Yen 2927 days ago
There's another potential cause for procrastination, that this website doesn't seem to diagnose or offer advice on -

I have a hypothetical task in front of me, which is interesting, impactful, within my skill range, well-defined, and I know the first couple steps to start on it. I estimate that I can complete the task with 2~3 hours of solid work. This sounds like the _ideal_ anti-procrastination scenario, right?

But, I know I have a meeting at some point in the next 20~40 minutes, and that meeting will end 15~5 minutes before lunch starts.

And then, hypothetically, the meeting gets canceled, or is shortened to ~5 minutes, and basically the whole morning's worth of time has been wasted.

Any advice for either

> how to overcome the hump of starting to spin up on a deep work task you're likely to be interrupted for

or

> how to commit to starting a deep work task in a known uninterrupted block of time later in the day, and find _meaningful_ shallow work to do now, in a way that won't delay spinning up on the important task when the time becomes available

1 comments

If you have 10 minutes or more then trying to spin up is still useful.

You are not going to make progress directly, but you will have a few hooks to think about during the meeting. If it's a wasteful meeting you get something worthwhile to do, and if it's a useful meeting then no harm done.