Just Start: Swimming and procrastinating

You can't do both at the same time

For just under a year now, I’ve been taking my son to swimming lessons on Saturday mornings. For most of that time, my I’d drop him off, dash upstairs to the viewing gallery, uncork a flask of coffee, and crack open a book to read while I occasionally glanced down at him lolloping around in the water (sometimes, he tells me he doesn’t like swimming: from watching him, this seems to be an enormous lie). Recently, though, I made a decision: like a couple of the other parents, I would simply drop him off with the swimming teacher, then wander over to the Big Pool to practice my (terrible, inefficient) front crawl.

The problem? I only have half an hour each time to do it.

Wait, did I say problem? I mean best part.

Something you sort of internalise when you do a lot of workouts is that, quite often, when you don’t have much time to do things, you get more done. You focus up and pick the movements that actually work, bash through them quickly and intentionally, and don’t rest much. Instead of four different moves for your chest and another four for your back, you just do press-ups and pullups every minute for ten minutes, and then you’re done.

So, when you only have half an hour to swim (really more like 25 minutes, when you take towel admin into account), the question changes from What should I do? to How much can I get done? In swimming, this means a couple of lengths of kick drills, a couple of arms-only stuff, a few focused on going slowly but actually moving properly through the water and a bit of breaststroke at the end for fun.

But what about everywhere else?

I said that this is something you internalise when you do a lot of workouts, but it’s something I’ve recently been forgetting about when I actually do work. If you spend long enough in a 9-5 (or 9-7, or 8-6), it’s easy to feel like just sitting down at your desk counts as work: if you sit at your desk for eight hours, you have done a good days’ work, and if you don’t, you haven’t. But this obviously isn’t true! Sometimes I go walk the dog, come back and frenziedly type out half a dozen ideas that count as more productive than anything else I’ll do for the rest of the day. Sometimes I write for two straight hours and turn out 1,500 good words, and I really should just forget about doing anything else creative and paint the ceiling or play with the boy.

Some things I’ve specifically been trying to do to fix this:

• Keeping to the actual 9-5 (on screen, anyway). I try to open my laptop at 9ish and shut it down at 5ish — outside of those times, I might be thinking about things, scribbling things down on a notepad, filming, or making stuff, but I try not to be actually working. If you know that you have to stop at 5, you don’t let things drag out, and if you don’t start work until 9, you have time to get up a decent head of energy before you dive in.

• Following the three-hours-ish rule. This is one from Oliver Burkeman’s excellent Meditations For Mortals, where he notes that many creative people only had about three ‘creative’ hours a day — the time where they were actually producing their best work. This takes the pressure off needing to find huge, glass-flat slabs of time throughout the day — if you can grab three solid hours dotted throughout the usual eight, the rest can be meetings, admin or busywork, and you’re still getting things done.

• Doing flexi-doros. Traditional pomodoros, as you might be aware, are 25-minute blocks of work followed by 5 minutes of away-from-screen break. Flexi-doros are a bit more flexible: the idea is that you might start with just 10 or 15 minutes before each break, but once you get into a flow state you can up the timer to 45 or 50 minutes so that you aren’t interrupted. There are a bunch of (often paid) apps that do this, but I just use a stopwatch.

Sprint coach Charlie Francis used to have a rule: if one of his athletes got a PB in a training session, they’d finish it right there, on a high, rather than pushing further or risking injury. Maybe that’s worth doing with work?

Have a great week!

Joel x

ps Appropriately (ironically?) for a post on procrastinating, I’m aware that I’m posting this four days late. It’s been busy. Back Friday!

Stuff I like

📖 Book - The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis

This is one of those books that I keep seeing recommended/quoted in different places, and it’s short, so I thought I might as well give it a shot. It’s also pretty good! The basic idea is that it’s a series of letters written by a veteran demon to his neophyte nephew, explaining how to make him a nastier person and prevent his conversion to christianity. Obviously this means there’s a chunk of theological stuff, but the comic vibe means it never feels outright preachy, and there’s quite a bit that might make you pause and consider whether you’re really living your best life (atheist or otherwise).

🎥 Video - How every primarch was discovered by the Emperor

After a 30-year hiatus from Warhammer, I’ve taken to listening to lore deep-dives while I paint my house, and now I probably know more about the Horus Heresy and the different chapters of the Space Marines than I do about WWI. I’m a nerd, what do you want from me.

Like this newsletter?

If you’re keen to support this newsletter and the other stuff I do, I’d love it if you became a paid subscriber: you don’t get anything extra (I don’t paywall anything), but it helps me write longer and more original posts, as well as feeding my family. I really do appreciate it.

Also, if you’ve got a book or an article you think I should read, or something you think I should watch or try, please send a suggestion my way.

And finally, if you haven’t already, please check out my YouTube channel, where I deep-dive into stuff like productivity, lifelong learning, piano and Brazilian jiu-jitsu.