The distraction trap?

Having just started my freelance career this one feels really poignant.  

There’s a point towards the end of busy week, usually when I'm trying to reconcile my to-do list and trying to plan the following week, where I find myself halfway to Aldi, wondering how I got there. 

Not metaphorically. Physically. On foot, with shopping bags under my arm and a sudden, pressing need to feed my family and grab those bake at home pain-au-chocs. It’s like sleep walking but more expensive. 

Productively unproductive 

Welcome to what I call the productivity trap: the fine art of doing absolutely everything but the one thing you really need to do, while convincing yourself it’s progress. I’m productively unproductive. 

It’s not that I don’t want to do the hard thing. It’s just that marinating food for tomorrow’s BBQ feels, in that moment, far more achievable. Rewarding, even. And so begins the cycle: avoid the difficult task, embrace a worthy distraction, go absolutely all in. Twenty minutes later, I’m walking the dog… 

This is the issue: It’s all valuable… It looks productive. Meals get prepped. Fitness rings get closed. The fridge becomes a place of joy. But that one thing - the real thing - I was supposed to tackle? Still sitting there. Quietly judging me from a corner of my desk 

A flicker of awareness

But I’m learning. Slowly.

These days, there’s a flicker of awareness. A moment, just before I reach for the trainers or the slow cooker, where I clock what’s happening. Sometimes I ignore it. Sometimes I even try to talk to myself. My wife even calls me out on it now.  

And then there are moments like this very post - where I’m writing about the problem as a way of wrangling it into submission. Naming the pattern in the hope that awareness might somehow count as progress. Maybe if I articulate it clearly enough, the next time I’ll catch myself sooner. 

The hardest distraction to resist, though, is cooking. Nothing tastes sweeter than a slow cooked curry that I prepared earlier that day when I should have written up my notes… Jokes aside, it doesn’t feel like procrastination. It feels like following joy. Which makes it all the trickier to rein in.

It’s me, hi, I’m the distraction, it's me. 

I think the way forward is to acknowledge the distraction and use it properly - as a signal - pointing to discomfort, uncertainty, or maybe even a bit of mental fatigue. In simple terms, ask myself why am I looking for a distraction? Am I tired? Am I missing something critical to make the task easier? Or am I simply needing a bit of a creative outlet/  

Because the distraction isn’t the enemy. It is me. A part of me that wants to break free from the grind, to get fit or simply get creative with my stir-fry. 

So no, the goal isn’t to eliminate distraction. That’s never going to happen. The goal is to notice it. Understand it. Steer it when I can. Or, at the very least, delay it until after (a tasty) lunch.

Work in progress. But then again, aren’t we all?