Purposeful Procrastination
Most of us have been taught that procrastination is the enemy of progress. Put it off, and it won't get done. Delay, and you'll fall behind. The solution, we're told, is simple: sit down, push through, and do the thing you're supposed to do.
But what if that's not always true?
What if, sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is work on something else entirely?
A Strategy I Didn’t Know I Had
Last year, I stumbled onto a strategy that worked wonders—though at the time, I had no idea it was a strategy at all.
I was writing my second book, Cracking the Career Code, determined to apply the biggest lesson I’d learned from my first: Write every day. Not when inspiration strikes. Not when conditions are perfect. Every day.
The problem? Some days, I didn’t feel like writing about career advice or professional development. The well was dry. The words weren't there. And on those days, the honest truth is that forcing it produced writing I'd only have to delete later.
But I was committed to showing up. So on the days when motivation was missing, I simply wrote something else. Anything else. Articles, ideas, reflections—whatever I found interesting that day.
What I Discovered
By the time Cracking the Career Code came out last October, I realized something unexpected—I was already deep into writing my next book, Words to Wonder. Pages and pages of it, assembled quietly across all those days I thought I was doing nothing useful.
It took me four years to publish my second book. Words to Wonder followed in just over a year.
The days I thought I was avoiding the work turned out to be the work.
Procrastinating with Purpose
I've come to call this practice purposeful procrastination. But I want to be clear about what it is—and what it isn't.
It isn't avoiding hard things indefinitely. It isn't using distraction as an excuse to never finish. It isn't the procrastination most of us are guilty of, which is trading meaningful work for mindless escape.
Purposeful procrastination is what happens when you honor the discipline of showing up even when you redirect where that energy goes. The commitment stays intact. Only the destination changes—temporarily.
There's something important underneath this that I think applies far beyond writing.
Creativity doesn't always move in straight lines. Neither does growth, or healing, or becoming the person you want to be. We tend to measure progress by how directly we're moving toward a stated goal. But some of the most important work we do is happening sideways—in the conversations we didn't plan, the books we picked up on a whim, the quiet detours that turn out to have been the point all along.
The musician who can't crack a difficult passage and works on something simpler—only to return the next day and find the difficult passage suddenly flows. The entrepreneur who steps away from a stuck problem to help a friend with theirs—and finds the solution to his own on the drive home. The parent who abandons the to-do list for an unplanned afternoon with their kids—and finds themselves more present and more refreshed for it.
None of that looks like progress. All of it is.
A Final Thought
The morning I realized I had essentially written two books while trying to write one, I sat with that for a while.
I thought about all the days I'd felt guilty for not working on what I was "supposed" to be working on. All the times I'd told myself I was falling behind. All the small moments of discipline I'd almost skipped because they didn't feel like they were pointing in the right direction.
They were all pointing somewhere. I just couldn't see where yet.
If you're stuck on something that matters—a project, a goal, a season of life that isn't moving the way you hoped—the answer may not be to push harder in the same direction. Maybe the most faithful thing you can do is show up and let the work take whatever shape it needs to take today.
You might be further along than you think.
Just keep showing up. Even sideways progress is still progress.
And you never know what you might finish along the way.
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