Productivity Entertainment

Productivity entertainment is a form of procrastination in which you amuse yourself by passively consuming something that you could plausibly use to be productive.

For example, today I spent almost an hour browsing Hugo website themes instead of just opening vim and creating a website.

“Look at all those cool themes. Sure will be fun to make a website with one. I can even view live demos! Let me check how the links look when I hover, and if there’s dark mode. Are there special features I won’t need but it’d be good to know exist? This sure is fun - and productive! I mean, it’s been hard work carefully considering 72 different themes, but it was a critical step toward making my baller static website. Probably tomorrow, or maybe Saturday morning if I have time, I’ll just develop the actual site.”

Productivity entertainment involves consuming info that you, or at least someone, could use to be creative or get something done. That’s how, in the moment, it’s rationalized as a good use of time. But really it just serves as a way to distract and entertain. Instead of actually creating, your attention is absorbed by something that makes you feel as though you’re creating.²

A few forms of productivity entertainment I find myself engaging in:

• Watching cooking tutorials on YouTube
• Browsing Bootstrap CSS features
• Researching morning routine broscience I don’t have time for
• Watching videos of people playing piano or guitar (instead of just practicing myself)
• Reading GrapheneOS docs so I can escape the matrix and become Mr. Robot
• Reading indie blog posts about being productive

This is not to say any of these things are unproductive in their own right. In fact, the critical element of productivity entertainment is that it involves an activity that could be done creatively or productively. But if I’m not browsing the documentation or watching the video in order to take action, then it’s really just entertainment, and I should acknowledge that.³