Cleaning your room instead of doing your homework

We have a metaphor on the team called "Cleaning your room instead of doing your homework" to describe when someone does a lot of productive work instead of their most important priority. It's not negative per se, because cleaning your room is really important. A lot of our best code is written in "clean your room" time.

It allows us to be honest about our humanity. I myself need this freedom in my work. Regimented strict homework time is hard for me and if I'm going to be productive, I need cleaning my room to count as productivity.

For example, this post is cleaning my room instead of doing my homework, because myself and a couple folks from the team are going to be conducting some workshops at DevFestNYC and I've been tasked to finish up some dev.to integrations we have planned for the event. I really need to finish those. 🙃

Another notable instance of this for me was a time when I was working with on a dev.to post that had to go out on Monday morning. That was the weekend I created the whole comment system on the site and then I woke up really early on Monday to actually write the article. And lo and behold, that was the first post to have comments on it. 😄

Comments

[TJl19]

So this is basically positive procrastination, you're still avoiding the most pressing thing to do while focusing on other important things. I tend to do a lot of that, but honestly cleaning is the last thing I can focus on

[TJl19]

So this is like positive procrastination I tend to do a lot of that when I'm trying to work on my business and often cleaning
goes by the wasteside

[Enka Plus]

Temizlik konusunda uzman bir şirket her alanda başarılıdır. Bu nedenle temizlik konusunda gayet ciddi adımlar atanlar uzun vaadede başarıyı yakalarlar. Ev temizliği konusunda başarılı adımları ofis inşaat ve diğer tüm alanlardada sürdüren Antalya temizlik şirketi ciddi olumlu yorumlar almaktadır.

[Alex Bogdanov]

Cleaning must be fun. I work from home and schedule some cleaning during the day to keep myself fresh and motivated. Here are some more cleaning fun ideas.

[Will Soares]

I'm currently going through one of these moments and I feel like writing lots of blog posts (including a post about procrastination) instead of trying to fix a tough problem I'm having with a project.

[Daniel Coturel]

This happens to me from time to time too.