The Two Types of Procrastination
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Alex's diagnostic model for his own biggest professional weakness. Procrastination comes in two forms: doing non-work to avoid work, and doing the wrong work to avoid work. The first is obvious — social media, dopamine hits from likes and validation. The second is far more dangerous because it is invisible and justifiable: schooling teaches us that work means completing assignments and ticking checklists, so busy tasks that once mattered still feel productive long after the business has outgrown them. As a startup evolves, the highest-value work changes shape, and the old tasks are the comfortable ones. The signal that you have done it is what Alex calls the procrastination hangover — the yucky end-of-day feeling of having wasted a day on easy things because you lacked the courage or focus for the hard ones, which quietly erodes self-trust.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Label the avoidance type
When you notice you are not doing the important thing, classify it: are you doing non-work (scrolling, distraction) or wrong work (busy tasks that feel legitimate)? The two have completely different fixes.
Watch out Wrong-work procrastination is the one that survives every productivity system, because the system rewards ticking the boxes.
- 2
Audit your to-do list for legacy items
Go through your list and ask which items were genuinely the highest-value use of your time six months ago but no longer are. Alex's example was hours a day of LinkedIn outreach to hundreds of potential advertisers, easily justified as 'we need revenue'.
Pro tip Any task you can justify with a slogan rather than a current constraint is a candidate.
- 3
Ask what job the business needs from you now
As CEO the more important work had become planning — deciding where the business should be in three, six and twelve months, so you know how to spend today and who to hire today. Restate your role against the current stage rather than the stage you learned it in.
Watch out Without traction there is no playbook, which makes the planning work feel unrewarding and therefore easy to skip forever.
- 4
Use the procrastination hangover as your instrument
The end-of-day feeling of having wasted a day is data, not just guilt. Treat it as the after-the-fact detector that you spent the day on things that do not grow you.
Pro tip Log the hangover days for a fortnight and look for which specific hard task you were avoiding each time.
- 5
Protect self-trust by keeping small promises
Every hangover costs a little trust and self-belief, because you did not keep your word to yourself about the most important thing. Rebuild the balance with promises small enough that you actually keep them.
Watch out Do not let the pattern harden into identity. 'I am a procrastinator' is a story that then justifies the next avoidance.
- 6
Cover the gap with a partner where you can
Alex's co-founder Austin picked up the strategy and planning work Alex was never going to do. Naming the gap honestly lets it be covered, rather than leaving it silently unowned.
Pro tip Handing off is legitimate only after you have separated 'I hate this' from 'this is hard for me' — see the energy-audit method.
In the wild
For a stretch Alex spent hours a day doing LinkedIn outreach to hundreds of potential Morning Brew advertisers and scheduling calls with them. It felt productive because 'reach out to advertisers' and 'schedule calls' sat on the to-do list and got ticked off, and because the business genuinely needed advertising revenue. Meanwhile the work that had become more important to him as CEO — setting strategy three, six and twelve months out, and deciding who to hire today as a result — simply never got done. He never spent time on it at all.
→ Austin absorbed the planning work; Alex identifies this as the clearest case of doing work to avoid work.
The first type of procrastination — non-work to avoid work — got worse for Alex over time rather than better, specifically as he started creating content on Twitter and other platforms. The addiction to the dopamine hits of likes and validation became bad enough that he says he has literally considered creating a support group for phone addiction. The tool that was part of his professional output was also the mechanism of avoidance, which is what made it hard to cut.
→ Alex names it openly as an unresolved problem rather than claiming a fix.
Common mistakes
Reading a finished checklist as progress
School trains you that completed assignments equal work done. In a startup the highest-value tasks change every few months, so a fully ticked list can mean you executed last quarter's priorities perfectly while this quarter's went untouched.
Turning procrastination into an identity
Alex describes identifying as a procrastinator for so long that it cost him belief he could achieve anything again — feeding a money-hoarding mentality built on the assumption that Morning Brew was his one lucky shot.
Reframing it as 'part of my creative process' too early
Alex tried the positive narrative — that procrastination is inseparable from being idea-rich and creative — and admits he does not fully buy it. Used as comfort, the reframe becomes a coping mechanism that protects the behaviour.
From the transcript
“i'd say there's two types of procrastination it's doing non-work to avoid work and it's doing the wrong work to avoid work”
“i've used this term before of like the procrastination hangover and basically it's the feeling of after a long day feeling shitty”
“every time that happens and i have a procrastination hangover i think i lose a little bit of trust and self-belief in myself”
From the episode
Lessons From Selling Morning Brew For $75 Million At 28 - Alex Lieberman
Alex Lieberman