Photo by Quinton Coetzee on Unsplash

This Simple Journal Hack Might Be the Cure for Procrastination and Task Paralysis

I started time logging for the data — but I’m staying for the surprising side effects.

It’s all Tara McMullin’s fault.

I’ve been digging into her book What Works, which sneakily hides in the “goal setting and productivity” genre while really being a viciously accurate analysis and dissection of the whole hustle culture late-stage capitalism world we find ourselves in.

It’s the kind of book that asks questions like What are you, without the DOING? and then goes merrily on to other subjects, leaving you to stare up at the ceiling at 1am pondering what the answer is.

Or maybe that’s just me.

In one section she talks about the idea of capacity — which is how I found her book in the first place, listening to her talk with Charlie Gilkey (another great author who asks annoying questions). In the book, she suggests that if you really want to figure out what your capacity is, you should start by keeping a time journal.

It is exactly what it sounds like: writing down things as you do them. It doesn’t have to be exact, to-the-minute (unless, as Tara says, you are a “super Type-A or a dedicated Virgo”). But every time you do something…