I’ve been reading about productivity for a long time now. I’m long past the point where every article sounds the same and it feels like there’s no new advice out there. But there’s one piece of advice that I’ve been hearing for a long time, and only recently was I finally ready to listen:

Don’t do things that don’t need to be done.

It sounds stupidly simple. Of course you shouldn’t do things that don’t need to be done. But it’s easy to fool yourself. After all, you can tell yourself exactly what you want to hear.

I’ve been slowly going through all my old college papers and scanning what I want to keep. It’s a slow process, but we have a commercial scanner at work which makes it a little easier. One day after work I was standing over the copier with my computer, slowly scanning old script drafts. They were for a play I wrote many years ago. I like to keep the scripts from the readings because people write on them and it’s interesting to read comments about my old work.

These scripts are arguably the lowest priority of things worth scanning. These are old drafts, and the play that was actually performed ended up being very different. But they hold a certain sentimental value. And as a writer there is an education to be had from occasionally reading your old work.

The scripts were originally printed landscape and double-sided, so when I ran them through the scanner I ended up with a PDF where every other page was facing the opposite direction. I was clicking around and rotating pages when I realized how utterly unnecessary the task was. I might never look at these files again. And if I do, I’ll be going page by page to read them, and could easily rotate pages then. Plus it’s very possible that if I wait six months they’ll have invented a way to tell the PDF reader to only rotate odd pages, without having to click each individually.

This is what they meant when they said I shouldn’t do things that don’t need to be done. I felt the need to rotate the pages because it was in line with my habits of proper organization and storage. But even I know that I may never open these files again. I can barely justify scanning them. The time spent rotating is a complete waste.

Once I figured this out I realized something even more important: I don’t have to name them either. I was on auto-pilot, assuming it had to be done because that’s usually the case. Most of my files need to be named, but not all. I had eleven scripts that were going to be named after the person who had made the notes, but that information is already written on the first page. I can do it later if I need to. Instead I threw all the files into a single folder labeled “Reading Scripts” and called it a day.

Wasting time on over-organization is a problem of mine, I know that. Most of the time I can justify it because I like organizing and it can be meditative and satisfying. But I don’t like naming files or rotating PDFs. And not everything has to be done. Don’t do things that don’t need to be done.