Procrastination in a Bunker

On deployment, I wrote a newsletter. I was 21, sending reflections from a foreign land with tight restrictions on what I could and could not do and say. I knew how to string sentences together, but I hadn't read or written enough to move beyond adolescent syntax and style.

Reading now, some 15 years later, I see bits of value nestled into muddled prose:

This deployment has successfully isolated me from much of the life that I'm used to…the distractions that I face in Iraq have taken a new form, unlike any that I've experienced to date. When a task needs to be accomplished, there is no question about delaying the work. Operations are formed from so many separate entities that there is no time to wait for one aspect to lag behind. This gives a strong sense of importance to the work that we do, and it has helped me immensely in shedding my tendency to postpone what must be done…knowing that when the task is present, you and your team are capable of rising to the call.

Today, I'd rework the heck out of this. But there's something to be said for the sentiment.

Writing is a time capsule, and reading this transports me back to that bunker I called home for seven months. I had so much to do (the unabating mission) yet so little to do (there are only so many things one can do in said bunker when off duty).

It turns out that even back then, I was keen on assessing how a given situation impacts one’s productivity. I arrived organically at something I still find true today: choice is inversely correlated to your inherent likelihood of getting things done.

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I didn't like that environment, at least not in a traditional sense, but I did find key pieces of myself there. And as deployment wore on, I increasingly questioned our purpose there.

No matter what I thought, the restrictions all around me meant that I had to get things done. It's what was required of me and my teammates. It made the work feel urgent and important (box 1, for you Eisenhower Prioritization Matrix fans out there). And because our work had to be conducted in a secure environment, there were virtually no distractions to pull focus elsewhere.

I write these days about how to focus. How to discern. How to trim distractions and embrace meaningful ways to measure productivity without losing sight of what makes us human.

While I relish the freedom of choice I have today, it's useful to recall a time when I had such little autonomy. I got a lot done, yes, but at a cost. Operating in a zone of urgent and important is only sustainable for so long before hitting diminishing returns. That zone allows you to route around procrastination, but only for a time.

It’s unrealistic to live completely in a world of unfettered choice and distraction or a world of pure, mandatory focus. We all live somewhere between those extremes, and the more aware we are of where we are on the spectrum, and the more intentional we are about where we want to be on the spectrum, the better.

Or at least that’s what would I have written 15 years ago with a bit more practice and experience.