Rick Rubin was trying to lose weight.

So instead of holding meetings in an office or at a restaurant as he typically did, the record mogul would have walking summits.

He’d meet artists and executives in Santa Monica, then simply begin walking with them to flesh out ideas and concepts.

“Everything shifted just because we were moving, doing something and there were external stimuli,” Rubin recently said on the Jay Shetty Podcast.

“It was a change in context that really did make the conversation much more interesting.”

To Rubin, the shift in scenery and the increased productivity that came with it also offered critical insight into the difference between distraction and procrastination.

It’s relevant to us as well.

Distraction:

• Strategically deviating from the norm
• Stepping away from our usual environment to develop fresh thoughts
• Getting external cues that spark new ideas
• Still utilizing our brain, just think about the challenge differently

Procrastination:

• Putting off what we know needs to be done
• Feeling lazy and avoiding needed action
• Counterproductive activity that provides no additional value
• Essentially going into autopilot while ceasing work on a task

As leaders, we inevitably face challenges and intense workloads that we struggle to make progress on.

As a result, it can become enticing to step away and say that we’ll come back to the task later on.

But as we do so, we may want to ask: Is this break actually valuable distraction with a worthy end goal or am I just procrastinating what must be done?

The key to resolving our issue at hand may not be digging in deeper or stepping away entirely.

It might just be the subtle of creating a deliberate distraction.