Optima & Outliers

Paul Graham's essay titled "Good and Bad Procrastination" argues that procrastination can be virtuous when it means putting off small tasks to work on more important ones. He categorizes procrastination into three types: doing nothing, doing something less important, or doing something more important. The last category, he argues, is actually good procrastination - the kind practiced by "absent-minded professors" who forget to eat while solving important problems.

But this isn’t great advice for someone like me. For those of us with ADHD (or ADHD-like traits), the challenge isn't choosing the important over the urgent - our brains naturally gravitate toward novel, high-upside activities. The real challenge lies in managing the accumulating costs of neglected maintenance tasks and, more importantly, the reputational consequences of this pattern.

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