Productive avoidance is when you deliberately choose to do the small easy meaningless tasks first as a way of pushing the large difficult and important tasks further down the line.
‘Did you tell our son that he has to move out yet?’
‘No but look I got the clothes washed, dried and folded, I cleaned all the dirty dishes and I took the bin out’
Productive avoidance has its appeal because how could one complain about the floor being swept and hoovered?
But ultimately it is avoidance all the same.
Just a subtler, easy to rationalise form of procrastination.
As Mark Twain said:
“If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first”
Thomas Duggan 