Just Do It: On Procrastination

Like most other writers, I procrastinate in a variety of really creative ways to avoid sitting down in front of my desk and actually writing. Sometimes that means sketching out an outline of what I’m supposed to be writing, taking “notes” of ideas, or “thinking” of ways to conjure up a scene.

These little “pre-writing” exercises are nothing more than me putting off the inevitable: the writing.

Not Just for Writing

This goes for anything else you do in life (or try to). Procrastination is such a serious problem for so many people (“battling procrastination” brings back over 400,000 hits on Google) that there are whole books and studies dedicated to studying how it works and what we can do to fight it.

All so we can finally get some things done.

These are some of the tips you’ll find out there:

Set goals
Ask for help
Reward yourself
Be realistic
Set a schedule

Some of these work OK and some of them fail every time. But there’s one that works every single time—without fail.

The Article

I had an idea for an article about three weeks ago and I knew it would be around 1500–2000 words long, which is longer than the articles I write here on The Writer’s Coin. So right away I was a little intimidated: this wasn’t going to be so easy.

So I started an outline. Then I set some time aside to write an intro. Then I read a little bit about the topic and jotted down some notes in the magazine I was reading. Then, finally, when I sat down to actually write it, I ended up going over those notes and expanding on them.

After four weeks, I had three different outlines, tons of pieces of paper with notes sketched everywhere, and zero words. And still I thought to myself, “I’ve got to think about this some more before I start to write.”

Classic procrastination denial talk.

Just Do It

Then yesterday something happened. I woke up and instead of falling into all the trappings of blogging and procrastinating (checking email, checking stats, emailing people back, reading other blogs, etc.), I simply sat down to write the damn article.

The night before the inspiration had come to me: just stop messing around and write it all from beginning to end.

JUST DO IT.

An hour and a half and 2,400 words later, the article was finished. I was very happy but also shocked that I had actually, finally done it. No secret strategy, no sneaky exercises—just sit down and do it.

Tomorrow I can edit it, make it better, or start over. But for now, I wrote the first draft and without a first draft, it would never go anywhere.

Next time you start to fall into the procrastination trap, give this strategy your best shot. If you manage to pull it off, I guarantee you won’t fail.

Photo by bbaunach