You're not procrastinating

by Samir Talwar

Tuesday, 30 December 2025 at 23:00 CET

It’s the end of the year, and many of us, with a week or two with little to no “real” work, take the time to clean up, doing chores we’ve been putting off for weeks or months, making our homes, our workspaces, our lives a little tidier and more manageable.

(I finally took the defunct electrical goods to the recycling point, after ignoring them in a box behind my desk for approximately 9 or 10 months, and then found a thread of people on Fedi who had all done pretty much the same thing, so I know it’s not just me.)

My partner has been spending a lot of time over the past week clearing up her workspace: shredding documents, organising a filing cabinet, closing approximately 97,000 browser tabs, and letting go of things she’ll never read. I’ve done the same, though on a smaller scale: I’ve been closing tabs and deleting bookmarks, as well as doing lots of little server administration chores I never get the time to do.

So are we procrastinating when we don’t clean up our mess? Or are we procrastinating when we spend time cleaning up our mess when we should be “working”?

Neither. It’s all important.

We find it relatively easy to delay tidying up our office space, or the cellar, because we “have to work”. “I didn’t have time”, we mutter to ourselves as we fall asleep. Conversely, we feel guilty when we’re working from home and we take the time to throw some laundry into the machine, or clean up the kitchen. “I’m procrastinating,” we say.

You’re not procrastinating, you’re mode-switching: allowing your brain to do something else for a while so it can process the other work in the background. This is really important. It’s why debugging mostly happens when you go make a sandwich, or shower, or sleep. As I like to tell people, I’m not fucking about, I’m internalising.

It’s all important. You have to clean the dishes so you can debug your code, and you have to ship a feature so you can get some downtime to play Hollow Knight, and you have to play a game so you have the energy to feed the children or clean the house.

My partner spent a few days resting and cleaning, and suddenly she was able to focus on work better than she’s been able to in months. It’s been a joy to see it.

I am really glad I had the time, over the last week, to organise my life a little, take care of some tasks I’ve been putting off for months, as well as spend more time with my family. I hope that over the coming year, I can balance this better, and keep my creativity flowing throughout.