StartUp Founders: Procrastinate More
Dear Reader,
The quicker you realize your brain has two sides, and they love to compete, the more fun everything gets.
One side wants to grind. To push through. To brute-force a solution.
Startup culture punishes inaction… It worships speed.
The other needs you to step aside so it can actually do the work.
The quicker you realize procrastination also has two sides and they feel exactly the same, the more dangerous it gets.
- One side is destructive. Avoidance, fear, resistance.
- The other is constructive. Incubation, refinement, divergence.
The problem is that both feel like procrastination. The experience of strategic thinking often feels identical to procrastination.
In reality, walking away from a hard problem often solves it faster than forcing yourself to grind through it.
You know this. You’ve felt it. But you ignore it because you’re convinced you’re wasting time. That you should be pushing harder, forcing the solution, battling through. Founder Mode.
There is a model to achieve excellence in procrastination. A way to do it right.
If it’s constructive, it only works if you’ve actually started. If you haven’t danced with the problem, your brain has nothing to solve.
The goal, is to let your brain ambush you with the best ideas while you’re wasting time.
Quick Disclaimer:
This isn’t a newsletter on hacks to crush procrastination. It’s about understanding it and making it work for you. If you’re just being lazy, start with Kaizen and come back next week.
They Have Names!!
Strategic thinking feels like procrastination, because of your discomfort of doing nothing. The anxiety of delaying action. The uncertainty of allowing ideas to incubate when it’s your job to have all the answers right now.
The outcomes so many founders get are strategic, but the experience for many founders is procrastination.
Your emotions can’t tell the difference between destructive avoidance and constructive incubation. That’s why we label it all as “procrastination” and hate ourselves for it.
One of my favorite things is finding out that my super unique, ultra-nuanced dysfunction. The thing that makes me think I’m a unique snowflake… actually has a name. Two names, actually.
📌 The Zeigarnik Effect: Your brain hates unfinished tasks, so if you start something and then “procrastinate” your mind keeps working on it in the background.
That’s why ideas “suddenly click” when you walk away or when you’re in the shower not telling your brain what to think about. It’s why software has progress bar during onboarding… (let that sink in)
Your brain doesn’t need more brute force. It needs space.
📌 Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
Translation: The less time you have, the more you get done.
We know this, it’s why the last-minute rush to meet the deadline often produces our best work. When you procrastinate, you compress the timeline, forcing your brain to ruthlessly prioritize and cut the crap that never mattered.
I Spend an Absurd Amount of Time “Doing Nothing.”
I call it incubating.
Some of the best work is no work. I know it, I understand it, I manage it, and I love it. A solid TikTok doomscroll does wonders for my mental health.
Would you rather have an engineer churning out endless code, ticking backlog items off like a machine?
Yes. You would. Of course. That’s their job. To do the things you put on the list.
BUT, what if an engineer spent all day not coding and realized they could solve the problem with 10 lines instead of 1,000 or make something more future-proofed, more intelligent?
The idea of an engineer sitting in a conference room, doodling in a notebook for six hours, would make your blood boil. But if they took a “mental health day” to reset, you’d probably encourage it.
Both serve the same purpose.
One looks like destructive procrastination. The other is just forced, structured not-thinking (constructive). The difference is only how we choose to frame it.
We accept “rest” as valuable. We struggle to accept “not doing anything” as work.
🚀 The best line of code is no code.
🚀 The best product decisions often come from thinking, not building.
🚀 The best ideas show up when you stop forcing them.
More specifically, as you think about your product and the feature farm you’ve built, time allows you to think more about the outcome and less about the feature.
Call it procrastination if you want.
The Procrastination Signal.
Not all procrastination is about incubation. Destructive is just that, avoiding something you don’t want to do.
It’s mostly not laziness. It’s fear. Fear of doing the job, where to start or how to do it.
Which gives you two options:
1️⃣ Procrastinate more and pray the problem magically disappears. (This is my default, sometimes I get lucky.)
2️⃣ Ask yourself why, break it into bite-sized chunks, and do literally the first step. (Back to Kaizen.)
The second option almost always wins no matter how great option one sounds.
I hope you’re getting the vibe of this newsletter. I’m asking you to come to terms with who you are, how you operate, and inserting some mild humor and a little truth to let you know we all do it.
It’s about naming it and finding your way to make it work for you.
Your brain is a pattern-recognition engine. It works best when you give it input, then let it wander.
Sometimes, the best move is no move.
So take the walk. Watch the stupid video. Stare at the ceiling.
The trick is learning to distinguish between uncomfortable-but-productive incubation and just plain avoidance. Both feel the same in the moment – that’s what makes this so tricky. The difference? Intention, starting point, and outcome.
Is it laziness or leverage? Avoidance or optimization?
Anyone else watching the guy on TikTok unclogging drains?
As always, if I can be of service, feel free to grab time.
LFG.
— James