Procrastination – one of my favourite subjects.
In fact, judging from the number of blog articles about it, it almost seems to be every blogger’s favourite subject… I suppose, procrastination and creativity go hand in hand, like day and night. Two sides of a coin. You can’t have the one without the other.
And here comes my point. If procrastination is an integral part of doing anything that involves creativity or proactive thinking, why fight it? Why not just accept it as part of the process?
I have started doing this and it seems to work – to some extent.
Before I tackle a copywriting task, I allow time for a bit of conscious and deliberate procrastination. I know I will sit down in a moment and do what I need to do, but first I must sort out this file and label these boxes and faff around with the printer and look what’s happening on Twitter… and whatever other procrastinating activity I can think of.
But all the while I know that this is just part of getting ready to do the writing I need to do. And then, suddenly, at the end of all this procrastinating, I find myself raring to get started on the actual task at hand.
What about the bigger tasks though?
The only thing I’m still struggling with is the fact that the length of procrastination time seems to be directly related to the size of the job waiting to be done. So, for a short piece of copy, a press release or announcement for example, I only need about half an hour of procrastination before I can start writing. So that’s no big deal. The job still gets done in a reasonable timeframe.
For a bigger task, on the other hand, especially if it still needs figuring out what exactly is involved, I may need days and weeks of procrastination before I’m ready to tackle it. (The time it has taken me to get this blog off the ground is a case in point!)
So, when a the task is so big that I really need a week of procrastination and displacement activities, I’m not really prepared to indulge myself in this amount of procrastination. Yes, half an hour or an hour, that I can accept. But not days or weeks. Come on!
Still working on this one…
As a result, I get lots of little tasks done, but none of the real biggies. The ones that would require several days or even weeks of dedicated procrastination before I’m ready to get started. I wonder what amazing things I might be able to achieve if I allowed myself complete procrastination freedom…
Either way, I think it’s important to accept that this is what it takes: getting things done requires a process of intention, procrastination and displacement activity followed by action. That’s how it works.