I recently received this post from Joanna Maxwell (Work In Colour). It resonated, rang a bell, touched a nerve, pushed some buttons (and any other appropriate metaphor) so strongly, I felt I needed to share it.
I took a couple of client-free days last week to do some writing on my Escape Hatch book. First thing on Monday morning, I fired up the computer, opened Scrivener (the best book-writing software I know) and pulled out my notes and mind maps. It had been a while since I’d visited this project and I was excited to have carved out this time.
After staring at the screen for five minutes or more, I went and did a load of washing. I came back and looked at the screen again, then made a pot of soup. More screen staring, then I walked the dog for an hour.
Lunchtime. So I ate the soup, then checked my emails. At about 3pm, I started work. Once I had started writing, it was fine, and the rest of my time went well.
Clearly I had survived an attack from my old friend, The Procrastinator. I am quite familiar with this pest, and generally manage to deal with it much more quickly than I did this time. In my experience, the more creative or scary the project, the deeper the hold of The Procrastinator. Whatever form it takes, in the end it comes down to fear – of failure, of finding out you have no talent, of people laughing at you, of not being able to live up to your own expectations. Or maybe fear of finding out your idea wasn’t as clever as you had thought, or that you have fallen out of love with it. The list is pretty long, and I’m sure you could add to it, too.
So, what can you do about this?
- Find some simple and mechanical tasks – housework, cleaning out a cupboard, organising your office or studio, cleaning out the shed, gardening. These work on multiple levels – they get you moving, let you start and finish something (with the sense of achievement that comes from that), they take your mind off things…
- Get moving – dance, walk, swim, jiggle, shake, breathe. Believe it or not, these feelings exist in the body and they can be removed by moving the body and letting the feelings find a way out.
- Stop for a moment, relax, and explore what you are feeling. Is it overwhelm, pressure, frustration, indecisiveness, anxiety, panic,? Whatever it is, accept the feeling and make friends with it. You can journal, walk with it, breathe through it, meditate… there aremany ways through this, but naming the feeling and accepting it are crucial.
- Finally, my favourite, which is to bribe yourself: 10 minutes (or whatever feels possible) on the dreaded project and then the reward..
If you need more than a quick fix, then try some baby steps. I first encountered these when trekking in the Himalayas, where I was told that the way over a (seemingly endless) mountain crossing was ‘baby steps, baby steps’ – it worked then, and whatever the project, it’s a very powerful way to get from here to a (seemingly unreachable) there.
sharpen the pencil) then leave it for an hour or a day, then do the next step and so on… it’s simple, but it really does work. Try doing 5 minutes at the same time each morning, and 5 minutes at the same time each night – it sounds like nothing, but can add up to real progress over a relatively short time.
What are your procrastination-busters?