Paul Graham on Procrastination

https://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

My takeaways from this are:

1. Be ruthless about what goes on your todo list.
2. If you want to accomplish ambitious things (which by definition, push your limits), you will need to procrastinate more useless things (which will not be mentioned in your obituary). It's fine to let the dishes pile up or put off shaving if you're doing it for your projects; it's likely net beneficial.

An amazing read. I'd #recommend it to anyone, especially people who get an itch from designing their own systems (I'm looking at you, users of Obsidian and Todoist). It calls out hidden procrastination by identifying three kinds:

Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.

There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.

Paul argues that type B is the most harmful kind of procrastination. It is the kind where you make a todo list, or put things on the todolist that don't need to be there. What needs to be there? Essential things you'd otherwise forget to do, or things that actually save more time than they cost. But most people who want to do great things (or are afraid to ask themselves what the best thing is that they could be doing) find it easier to clean the "messy" house, or meal prep excessively.