Not All Inaction is Procrastination — 3 Legitimate Reasons to Delay

The first step to solving any problem is to recognize whether you actually have one.

It’s common to immediately attribute any inaction or delay to procrastination, resistance, or “fear of leaving your comfort zone.”

But the productivity culture babble is often wrong.

Here’s a fact that might throw you:

Not all delay or inaction is procrastination.

Newsflash:
Not all delay or inaction is procrastination.

That’s right. Your delay could be perfectly legitimate.

It also might not be resistance.

It might seem hard to imagine, but sometimes inaction is actually a more effective strategy.

Before you go down the path of unpacking the reason for your “procrastination” with the Procrastination Matrix, check in with yourself to see if your delay or inaction is attributable to some other cause.

3 Reasons for Delay or Inaction That Are Not Procrastination.

(1) Timing

Just because you’re not planting trees in winter, doesn’t mean you’re procrastinating.

You’re waiting for the appropriate season.

When evaluating everything you “have to do” that you aren’t doing, question whether now is the right time to focus on that project or task.

Just like in nature, every project and area of focus in our lives goes through a seasonal cycle.

We can’t tackle everything at once.

Sometimes we must shelve a project for a while to work on something else.

Recognizing what’s in “winter” can free up a lot of mental energy and bandwidth for the projects that are in spring and summer.

(2) Effectiveness

Sometimes a task will be rendered moot by a conversation or by another task, especially in a shifting landscape.

It makes no sense to do work that you’ll have to redo once the next piece of the puzzle falls into place.

For example, imagine you’ve been delaying a thorough cleaning of your house, but you’re also going to have a party soon. It’s more effective to do a minor clean up of key areas before your guests come and then a thorough deep cleaning after the party.

Or perhaps you’re waiting to take action because you’re waiting on a crucial piece of information to come from someone else.

It is perfectly acceptable to wait for things to shake out before you expend effort on certain tasks.

That said, beware of the trap of blaming your procrastination on an outside force that you cannot control. Are you delaying action because you think you need a piece of information, or do you really need it?

(3) Relevance

Maybe the thing you are not doing doesn’t actually need to be done in order to meet your outcome.

Sometimes we think we need to take a lot of actions to get a result, when really we only need to do a few things.

Pareto’s Principle — best known as the 80/20 rule — says that 20% of our efforts gives us 80% of our results.

If you can get the same results by focusing on the highest leverage tasks, thereby doing less, why wouldn’t you?

Check in with your task list and look at what tasks will really move the ball forward on a project.

Another aspect of relevance relates to priorities. Sometimes our priorities shift and a project or task is simply no longer relevant to us.

Be honest with yourself about what you’re ready to release.

If there’s something that you keep saying you need to do but you’re not doing it, it might be time to take it off your list, at least for now.