Ok, ok, so I prefer “Do, or do not, there is no try”. However, though I aspire to be Yoda-like, sometimes my humanity takes the form of procrastination.
I don’t write every day for the daily posts here, I post every day. Big difference. I reserve time for writing. When I am in flow it is wonderful, sometimes sitting for hours and writing 4, 6, even as many as 8 posts at one time. Forgetting to eat, realising I’m sitting in the dark, totally in “Flow”.
The thing is, sometimes I get deep into procrastination too, even though I am well past the “30 days to make a habit” stage of daily posting. As the saying goes “why put something off today that you can put off until tomorrow”.
What is the secret to overcoming this with writing? I’d say it has two elements :
- Commit
- Make the commitment to write to a schedule. I chose daily as I knew it would help address the procrastination demons
- Pick a theme and a style
- My theme here is generally Leadership, and my style is to observe something and then write about it with an application from my observation.
By committing and having a theme, I simply find that things come to me to write.
Today’s was procrastination, so see what I did here? Used my own procrastination to write a post. Win-win!
Oh, and the masterwork on procrastination is “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield.
Now, every challenge is an opportunity, and though I approached this book to support procrastination, it is full of thoughts and lessons that support our growth in many ways.
This quote speaks to me :
“Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the surer we can be that we have to do it.”
Do your work, the world needs it.