Hello everybody. You're listening to Liberatory Business, a podcast by me, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening.
Today I'm having a conversation with a very special guest whom I just met in Singapore. Here's how we first bonded. I was doing a Q&A with an audience in Singapore, and someone asked a question about how to overcome procrastination. I began talking about my take on procrastination, and after the talk, my guest — Maisie — came up to me and we started talking about how we both used to identify as procrastinators, but don't anymore.
Talking more about our respective takes on procrastination, we realized there's such an important conversation to be had about how we think about the nature of work, how we talk to ourselves, and how so much of that impacts how much we get done and the quality of the work that gets done.
So I'm here to have that conversation with my friend Maisie Cheong.
I'm confident that by the end of this conversation you're gonna walk away with an entirely new way of thinking about how you work. And you might too become an ex-procrastinator — someone who doesn't think of themselves as procrastinating anymore.
Welcome to the show, Maisie.
Maisie: Hi! Thank you for the welcome — I'm really glad to be here. I love that introduction, especially the last bit. Maybe you'll also now become an ex-procrastinator.
Simone: Yes. That's our invitation to everybody. Let's all become ex-procrastinators.
I would love to ask you to introduce yourself very briefly, because I really want to get into the conversation and people are gonna just hear your brilliance.
Maisie: Sure. I am Maisie and I am a communication designer, which basically means I design communication based on people's personality type so that they can communicate honestly and better and build deeper connection in their relationships.
Simone: Including your relationship with your own creative work.
Maisie: Exactly.
Simone: Okay, so I wanna ask you — do you remember the first time you picked up this idea that you were a procrastinator?
Maisie: Yeah. All throughout my schooling life I would leave my assignments to the last minute, and that pattern just kept repeating. I remember as a university student I would have to take a long train ride to school and I would finish my homework on that train ride. And I remember either my mom or my friends saying, oh, why are you always so last minute? Do you have to procrastinate? And then that label stuck.
And I think that's the insidious thing about labels, Simone — somebody just suggests it because of their view, their angle, their perspective, and you adopt it really easily. At that time, in that context, the best descriptor for my kind of behavior was procrastination. There was no other word for it. And so I adopted it as my language.
Simone: So well put. I could tell almost the exact same story — waiting until the very last moment to do anything. A good illustration: I just came back from a trip through the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia, and I started packing my bags an hour before I was supposed to leave for the airport.
Maisie: Oh my God.
Simone: That is the story of my life. And I think if we were to poll a hundred people who consider themselves procrastinators and ask where they picked up that label, probably 99% of them would say school.
Because I think before school — which operates based on really rigid schedules and deadlines, where you have to fit inside this box and check off these lists — we don't have this idea that we are late for things, that we are the kind of person who procrastinates. All these constructs are kind of imposed on us when we enter these institutions.
Maisie: And just to add quickly to that — I feel like the construct of being punctual, being early, being quick, has a lot of adopted merits that aren't necessarily always true. It's like: if you're faster, if you're on time, your work is always better, you are always better. So procrastination gets that negative label also because punctuality and speed and efficiency get all of these borrowed virtues — which isn't always the case.
Simone: Okay, I was gonna talk about this later, but I can't help thinking about the cultural baggage that comes with that. I don't know if you have this in Singapore, but in Korea — at least when I was little, not so much anymore because our society has changed — there was such a thing as Korea time. Oh, I'll be there at five, and they actually show up at 5:45. You know, you're not late, you're just on Korea time.
Maisie: Oh my God.
Simone: Do you have anything like that?
Maisie: I don't think we have something exactly like that, but there is that pressure to be punctual and on time such that people extrapolate — if you are late, oh, what does this show about your character? It becomes a character trait when actually it's a—
Simone: —moral judgment. Yeah.
Maisie: Exactly.
Simone: I think the most painful thing for me as an ADHD person — someone who has been called a procrastinator by so many people, especially in my early life — is that it wasn't even the discomfort of waiting until the pressure of the last minute to get things done. Even that was okay. The most painful thing personally was people thinking I don't care. When it became a morality thing — like, she must not respect her teacher if she's always late, she must not care about other people if she's always doing things at the last minute after agreements have been made in advance.
Those accusations — when it becomes a pronouncement on your morality, on how much you care and respect other people — that's when it became really personal to me. I can handle getting a bad mark on a late assignment. But if you say, Simone, this means you don't respect other people, you don't care, you're a less ethical person — that's when it really stung.
Especially when I was younger, when I didn't have alternate vocabulary with which to understand my own experience. And if everybody around you is mirroring back this message that you're a bad, uncaring, disrespectful person, you begin to internalize it. You're like, what's wrong with me?
Maisie: Oh, Simone, thank you for putting words to that. I feel that so strongly.
This labeling is something we learn so quickly as a person in society because we are in a community, steeped in culture, and there are so many things we take on that are not ours. So many other people's truths that we adopt that aren't necessarily ours.
And so it becomes so easy to just say — because I procrastinated, I'm lazy. That word is so violent. Why couldn't I just say, because I took time? I have to say, because I procrastinated, that's why I'm lazy. Like I've indicted myself.
Simone: Right.
Maisie: It's such a harsh way to perceive our own actions. When I could have been happy procrastinating! When I came up to you after the talk, I told you I used to call myself a procrastinator, but the tension for me was that I felt happy procrastinating. I felt happy taking that time.
So I didn't know — did I count as a procrastinator or not? But I resound with what you said because I had those assumptions laid on me: oh, you don't care, or you're lazy. She has all this time, but why did she do it the day before the due date? And that made me question myself — is there something wrong with me? Am I really so lazy? Do I love comfort so much that I don't even feel bad putting off my assignment?
It's hard in Singapore if you do that, because everybody here is so efficient.
Simone: Exactly. You know what South Korea and Singapore have in common? These two societies modernized very, very fast and sort of adopted a Western-style capitalism on hyper fast track. And going back to what I said about Korea time — I've heard analogs to this in many other non-Western parts of the world. Africa time. India time. Island time.
I think that genuinely, people used to perceive time differently, and our relationship to time was different. And I think Western supremacy in modernity has come to label other ways of relating to time as the inaccurate ones — like the Western clock is always the right one. And so if you are late by Western standards, you are lazy. That pejorative description has been used towards many parts of the world to justify European powers asserting supremacy: you're lazy, we have to teach you how to be industrious and punctual and efficient.
And I think not only has that impacted the world in so many ways — but we're just looking at one cross-section of what it's impacted. So many of us are living with this almost like a sentencing. We have sentenced ourselves to the identity of a procrastinator who, to their own detriment, just cannot get with the program, is behind and lazy and doesn't care. What a burden to carry — maybe not even from your own culture.
Okay, let me try to stay on track. One insight you had that we talked about in Singapore, that I really wanted to ask you more about, was the difference between visible work and invisible work. Tell me about that.
Maisie: I feel so strongly about this, and I think it came from the desire to have alternative language to describe the experience I was having. With the lack of alternative language, we can only adopt the majority perspective — which in this case was procrastination — and that didn't sit with me anymore. I needed to represent my own experience.
So I got curious about why I feel at peace taking time before I do a task at the last minute. And I realized that I do a lot of invisible work. A lot of thinking and seeking clarity before I take visible action. And I realized that society doesn't credit invisible work. It doesn't credit intentionality, thought, introspection, reflection — all the pre-work, the pre-action that I have to do so I can then take a smooth, clear action.
One example that always demonstrates this for me: I did my master's in the UK and needed to complete a thesis — 20,000 words, one year to do it — and I only started really writing the bulk of it the day before my submission.
Simone: Wow.
Maisie: My family couldn't understand it. My spouse was like, oh my God, why did you do that? You go so intense, you shut off the world, for one whole day I can't contact you. But I experienced it as great flow. The reason I had that great flow the day before submission was because I had been doing pre-work for the rest of the year.
Obviously I wasn't spending the whole year doing pre-work — I was enjoying London. But mostly I had a lot of pre-work happening in my mind: how do I want to angle this paper? Who do I need to speak to? I'd done all the interviews I needed leading up to it. But the actual writing of the 20,000 words — I couldn't bring myself to do it before I had that clarity.
That is the value of invisible work. You care about taking time to make it clear for yourself in your mind, instead of hiding behind actions and just performing productivity so the world can see you doing something. If you do that, you may not feel connected to the piece you're writing. You may not have fully considered what you're saying.
The invisible work covers all of that internal thought. And these actions have consequences — so shouldn't they warrant the time to consider what you actually want to do?
Our modern society doesn't yet have the tools to interpret the invisible work that people are doing. So there are a lot of labels surrounding it. Oh, what did you do today? Oh, I did nothing. But you did a lot of invisible work. What if you just sat in front of your window, thinking and reflecting, doing deep work that is necessary for you to be a whole person — but what the world sees is: she just sat there and did nothing.
I felt this a lot when I took a one-year sabbatical from work to take care of my health, to realign with my purpose, to understand what I wanted to do. When I told people I was going to take a sabbatical, the most common response was, oh, what are you going to do?
Simone: Mm-hmm.
Maisie: And a sabbatical is literally defined as a break!
Simone: Yeah.
Maisie: But people don't understand that taking a break is also doing reflection, doing thinking, seeking clarity, confronting my flaws and my blind spots, and deciding how I want to go forward.
There is a lot of value placed on visible work because it's easily understandable. It helps people label what kind of worker you are — oh, she's diligent, she's hardworking. All of these terms describe visible work. But there isn't anything that really credits the invisible work.
Simone: You know, what you just said gave me an insight. I think we tend to overfocus on visible work because our entire understanding of time and productivity is based on an industrial factory model. The jobs that had to be done were task-based — you make this component, you make that component, you put the two together, boom, finished product. Like an assembly line. You're baking a pie: flour, sugar, butter, mix, roll, and so on. There's a finite defined task which, if you do them in order, yields a predictable result.
That's the kind of visible work we are trained to think in terms of. Whereas the kind of work you're describing, Maisie — and the work that I do — so much of it is not task-based. It's not factory assembly line industrial productivity. What we do is creative and intellectual and associative, and at some levels it's also spiritual. That work is not task-based.
Because when it engages more than just surface-level visible action, you need to think, to imagine, to dream. Ideas need to sink in and ferment and catalyze and cross-fertilize each other. For me, I always think about needing time for what I'd call spiritual downloads — I don't mean it in a woo way, just those moments when an insight lands, or dots connect that you've been trying to connect for a long time, but you were just taking a walk and boom, they connect. I'm sure everyone can relate to that. Those cannot happen when you're busy doing tasks. They require space.
A lot of times people talk about knowing something intellectually versus knowing something at the body level. When I'm coaching people, they often say, I know that in my head, but somehow my body isn't following. It takes time for an understanding to sink in from your brain to your body.
I do my most brilliant work — the work that is most recognized and celebrated and rewarded by the world — when my spirit, body, and brain are aligned. And it takes time for all of that to happen. The spirit needs to do its thing. The body needs to do its thing. The intellectual brain has to do its thing. All the pieces have to be in the right place, and then boom, they align. How did you come up with this? Well, it definitely wasn't by following a task-based schedule.
So a lot of what we might call invisible labor is anything other than very simple task-based factory-style work. And the world is telling us that AI is going to automate so many repeatable, task-based types of work. Which means what's going to be at a higher and higher premium is the creative work, the spiritual work, the associative work — the work that requires imagination and soulfulness that a computer can't crunch. That work is going to require so much space and so much time, and a lot of it will look like you're just doing nothing.
Maisie: Exactly. Oh my God, I think there needs to be more advocacy for invisible work.
And I let's, I mean — I think a very big part of why this random conversation resounded with both of us is that we deeply want alternative language and alternative stories. We've both felt the brunt of the single majority narrative that didn't sit with us, that we didn't fit into. And I want to give that to everyone listening who feels like there is no language to describe the thought and the work they put in.
It would be one thing if invisible work was a concept people just didn't know about. But it's not just that they don't know about it — they have a lot of negative associations with it. That's what does the harm. If you just went out on a typical Singaporean street and said, oh, I spent a day reflecting, people would ask, then what else did you do? Was that it?
There's this idea that invisible work is invisible because it's not good work, or because it's not meaningful. And what you said about the systems that value efficiency and productivity — that is all our society has learned to use to evaluate itself. A company audit, a performance review — the KPIs are always about visible work. There is no practice of the criteria being something that measures invisible work.
Simone: Yeah.
Maisie: What is your level of thought? We haven't learned how to value that. So because the system doesn't have that language, the people don't have that language.
Simone: How much creativity goes into this? How much discernment? How much originality? How much relational competence?
Maisie: Yes, yes, yes.
Simone: I want to give people alternative frames. And I think you and I talked a little in Singapore about the Asian component to this.
If you imagine the archetype of the ancient Chinese sage — someone like Confucius — you don't imagine them dashing from place to place, getting things done. You imagine them moving slowly, strolling, spending a lot of time sitting in contemplation and meditation. And if they say one thing, that one thing is so rich with meaning and wisdom. Better to say fewer things, but have those things mean more.
In sort of classical East Asian culture, a lot of what's valued is deliberation and discernment — the cultivation of your inner character, sitting with things, honoring relationships before acting, considering consequences. Before modern industrial productivity took over, it was honorable to move at a much slower pace. Moving slowly meant fewer mistakes, meant acting in ways more conducive to harmony for all rather than just rushing ahead according to your own agenda. There was a kind of nobility to that.
Maisie: I love that you brought that up. You're right. In traditional Asian culture there is a lot of emphasis placed on deliberation, contemplation, meditation — going back to self, connecting with your thoughts, because that brings you into a higher self. That makes you a valuable citizen because you're connected with yourself.
And I think somewhere along the way, with the entrance of modernity, we've categorized this whole school of wisdom into a drawer called rest. We've processed it as being in opposing forces with progress and modernity. We've classified it as not our original state but as the state we get to go to once we've finished being productive — once we've given all our output. And then, and only then, we can dissolve into that state.
Simone: So it's almost like there's two states — visible productivity, and everything else gets categorized as rest.
Maisie: Yes. Because it no longer seems impressive in this current age when everything can go so fast. In the past, going to the next town might take three days, five days by horse or on foot. But now you just take a cab and you're there. And I think that learned behavior of because we can do things faster, we need to work faster to keep up — that original experience of taking time as just being — now becomes the rest you have to earn. You have to kill yourself working for five, ten years, and then you can go into that state.
We've split the two. One is the productive self. The other is the rest that you deserve only after.
Simone: Right. Speaking of looking back to our ancestors for wisdom — I want to encourage everyone, wherever you're from, to find something in the wisdom of your ancestors that points to the importance of contemplation, deliberation, developing discernment. Doing a lot of what modern society would call nothing. Going on a journey just for yourself. Going on a pilgrimage, not producing anything. Spending a lot of time in nature.
I feel like if you look back far enough, every culture has some frame of reference for how those modes of being were valued. And I want to encourage everyone to look into what that might be for your ancestors, wherever you come from, because it'll give you a more tangible way of being able to connect to how to make that come alive for you.
Maisie: And I just want to say — connecting to your ancestral sources of wisdom takes time. That takes reflection and connection. Without the time we spend with our thoughts, connecting to our thoughts, we are just going to be performing and doing all the time. And that makes us half of ourselves. It cuts us off from our natural resources, our ancestral resources, and we are not putting the best version of us out into the world.
And the biggest systemic impact is that you have all of these people who are not spending time thinking — they just do and react. And so a lot of the violence and harshness we see today is a result, I feel, of people not being connected to their thoughts. Not taking the time to deliberate, to find alternative measures, to take the time to think instead of just picking the quickest way to react.
Simone: And taking the time to connect to their own wisdom, their own inner compass. Because I feel like you really have two choices: you're either tuned into your own wisdom, or you're reacting to what other people are telling you to do. One is definitely faster. But I can't help but wonder how many problems in the world would have been prevented if people in boardrooms, in places of government, weren't under so much pressure to look productive.
Maisie: Mm-hmm.
Simone: Okay, so here's the juicy question. What's the difference between avoidance and invisible work? Because I get this a lot from people who worry they're procrastinating — how do I know if I'm doing really valuable invisible work or if I'm just avoiding?
Maisie: Even in that question, I find it so interesting that they need to determine the worth of their invisible work so quickly.
Simone: Oh, so good.
Maisie: Like, how do I know my invisible work is valuable? That question itself already comes from a deeper narrative: my invisible work is only valuable if I have something to show for it.
If you're thinking that way, you are still in visible work mode. It's not that you don't think during invisible work — it's that you need to hold space for the idea that the impact may not be visible immediately, or may not be something you can show other people to prove: ah, you see, that's why my one day of reflection was worth it, because the next day I sent 5,000 emails. You don't want to measure invisible work by the same parameters as visible work — that isn't true to its value.
Invisible work is where you connect to your thoughts such that you've achieved a certain level of certainty — and you no longer need visible work to be the shield, the armor that says, hey look at me, my invisible work was valuable. The clarity you get from doing that invisible work is your biggest indicator that it was meaningful. If you got something for yourself, if you felt some peace — that is meaningful.
Avoidance will give you a very different feeling. Avoidance may give you anxiety. The sense of I'm not thinking, I just don't want to do this right now. That is a different color. If it takes you farther away from your dreams and you feel that anxiety and lack of peace — that's a different color.
Simone: I don't understand how you are so beautifully eloquent.
If someone were to ask me this question — if I feel or fear that I might be avoiding something, if it feels like anxiety or fear and it doesn't feel good, I do one of two things. I change my action — I just get up and do the laundry, just do the thing. Or I change the way I talk to myself. That's it.
Because sometimes you genuinely feel better when you just go and do the thing. It's so funny — sometimes I have to pee and I will just not get up and go to the bathroom because I'm like, ugh, too lazy to get up, until my bladder is practically bursting. I'm like, just go freaking pee!
Maisie: I feel that. I am guilty of that as well.
Simone: You do that too?
Maisie: I do that too.
Simone: What is wrong with us? Just go! The bathroom is ten steps away.
Sometimes taking the action is the answer. And if it's not that — if it's more about how you're talking to yourself — the question I ask is: what kind of friend am I being to myself in this moment?
I'm lucky to have a best friend who always thinks the world of me, who would never say anything mean to me, who thinks the best of me under all circumstances. I always think, what would she say about this? Would she be repeating my default asshole voice to myself — what's wrong with you, you always do this, if you don't do this then such and such bad thing is gonna happen? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Is this how I want to be talked to? Is this how someone who cherishes and treasures and believes in me would talk to me about this?
And then I ask myself, what would I say if I were coming from that place? That gives me a lot of insight.
So much of this work of reconfiguring your relationship with work is reconfiguring your relationship to yourself — which, as a communication expert, Maisie knows is about changing the way you talk to yourself.
Maisie: So good. Thank you. I love how you brought in reframing, because reframing is another kind of invisible work.
Simone: Oh yeah.
Maisie: And I think we really wanted to have this conversation also just to name all the different kinds of invisible work that we do, so that people who are listening can go like, oh, I reframe all the time — I didn't know that was work. That is work. You reframe for yourself. You resource yourself. You don't go and dump on somebody else. That already makes you a more responsible partner in any relationship.
Simone: Someone who is chronically reacting to the world and so caught up in doing what externally feels productive — what I observe about those people is that they don't have a lot of neuroplasticity. It's hard for them to learn how to think differently. It's going to be hard for them to access a reframe, to question their own beliefs, to gain enough flexibility in the way they think to change the way they talk to themselves, to get new ideas. Because thinking room requires time. And they're not giving themselves that time. They're so busy doing. So busy reacting.
So a lot of the times when I talk to people about reframes, about changing the way you talk to yourself — the prerequisite is you have to slow down enough to notice what frame you're in in the first place. You have to slow down enough to actually listen to what you're telling yourself. And a lot of people who are not in the habit of slowing down are actually really unskilled at that. Anyone can get better at it — they're just unpracticed.
And that has big consequences in the long run. If you don't know how to slow down and examine your own mind and body and spirit, how to listen to all the different parts of you, to put some room in there to wiggle things around — all that inner life, if you don't give it oxygen, it's really going to cost you.
Maisie: It is. And it's going to cause collateral damage as well.
From the relational perspective, where I do my work, I see that people who don't have this inner dialogue, who don't take the time to do the invisible work — they don't have self-awareness. They are less practiced at reframing. And so there is a lot of load that their partner has to carry.
Take this macro and look at all the people who don't have this self-awareness, who don't do this invisible work — everybody else in the world carries the load of their actions. And that is what we are witnessing today.
We are not talking about some soft woo work of talking to yourself. We are talking about the best way to be a responsible human. That creates a community of humans who learn how to be accountable, who have the bravery to be self-aware, and who have the resources to reframe so that they can take responsibility for their own actions and put forward considered actions rather than reactions — which is where so much harm lies.
Simone: Mic fricking drop, Maisie. So brilliant.
Simone: Okay, I want to ask you one last question. Instead of saying to myself, "I'm procrastinating," I blank. Fill in the blank.
Maisie: Take time to clarify my thoughts.
And I really feel that. Now, if I have a task and I know the deadline, I actually plan to work on it one day before. And that is intentionality. It's different from saying, "I'm only going to start it one day before." It's more like: I am going to take visible action one day before, and I'm going to start the invisible work from now.
Simone: Oh, brilliant.
Maisie: We need to use accurate language to describe our work, rather than take on labels that people have used to evaluate just the visible work portion.
Simone: Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. If I were to answer the same question — instead of telling myself I procrastinate, I tell myself: I get curious about what parts of my thinking and my body and my spirit need to come into alignment, and then I take time to allow that alignment to happen.
I hope that Maisie and I have offered you plenty of different ways to reclaim the language you use for yourself.
Maisie, before we close — what are you doing right now? How can people find you and work with you?
Maisie: I am present on Instagram at @whatmaissiesaid — I'm sure that can be linked somewhere — and my website is maisiecheong.com. The work I do for individuals, couples, or teams is that I profile people and design the best communication for them to speak to themselves and to others, so that they can have deep connection, feel seen, and be honest in their conversations. And a lot of that starts with how you talk to yourself, which is exactly what we talked about today. You'd be surprised at how many labels people have about themselves.
Simone: How do you profile people — is it human design? What's your process?
Maisie: The profiler I use is the Enneagram, because the Enneagram looks at what you value — integrity, authenticity, things like that — and that shapes the way you express yourself, and the way you like to be connected with. So what I do is design a blueprint for each person that tells them: here are the words and the actions that make you feel really good, that you can give as directions to the people important in your life. Then those people have accurate information to connect with you. The result is that you feel good in your relationships, you can speak honestly, and you feel seen. I call this emotional accuracy.
It's something I want to advocate for because just like tailored clothes, you need to tailor your communication. You can't just take communication tips from the internet and assume that everybody wants to be appreciated the same way or repaired with the same way. Based on what we value, the language that connects us differs. And the thought you put into connecting accurately with people — that's also invisible work. That is thought, that is authenticity. And it creates much better relationships.
Because I think, Simone, the one problem in the world right now is that there isn't enough understanding. There isn't enough empathy. I don't take the time to understand your perspective, and I don't take the time to use the language that will resound with you. I just want to say my piece, be correct, and move on.
Simone: Oh my gosh, so good. Okay, I'll put all the links in the show notes.
Thank you so much, Maisie. What a rich, rich conversation. I hope everybody who's listening feels as liberated and clarified as I do right now. And I'm sure this is not the last time we talk.
Maisie: I look forward to talking again. And if you just want to take away one thing from this talk — understand that you are going to feel the sweet fruits of the invisible work you do for yourself. You're going to get clarity for yourself. You're going to get peace for yourself. And the beautiful thing is you will no longer need external validation, because you're connected with your thoughts. You don't need to hide behind actions for other people to value you.
Let's say that again for ourselves.
Simone: Boom. So good. Thank you so much, Maisie, for being here. Thank you for listening, and I'll talk to you next time. Bye.