Writing When Struggling With Procrastination: Update And Retrospective · 9:45pm May 7th, 2016
Heyo peeps.
So about nine months ago I blogged about my struggles with procrastination, how procrastination has affected me and my writing, what some of the things I’d figured out about it were (along with links to the excellent and illuminating blog Wait But Why, where procrastination is a somewhat perennial topic), and some of my plans for attempting to tackle it. At the time, that blog did exactly what I wanted it to do. Namely it caught the attention of some of you folks who have been struggling with your own procrastination problems.
It was also an attempt to light a fire under my ass with a declaration of taking steps to try and overcome the problems. I thought it would be a good idea to revisit the plan I’d set out in it, face my slip-ups, and write down what adjustments I’d made since, as a stoking of that fire, and as possible help for others still struggling. Also to maybe catch new folks who have the problem and point them towards my previous blog and the Wait But Why articles.
So before we really get started, here are some links to check out, if you’re one of those new folks.
The stellar series on procrastination by Tim Urban at Wait But Why:
Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
How To Beat Procrastination
The Procrastination Matrix
My previous blog, which I’ll be referencing and touching base on:
Writing When Struggling With—Oooh! Cat Gifs!—Procrastination
Also, since the previous blog, Tim Urban gave a Ted Talk about procrastination you can watch:
Inside The Mind of a Master Procrastinator
After I wrote that blog, I planned to touch base somewhere around the six-month mark afterwards. So now that it’s been closer to nine months, let’s touch base. No, the irony is not lost on me.
The main reason I wrote that previous blog was because procrastination seems to be one of those topics that people internalize in a strange way. Many of us (even those who don’t struggle with procrastination most of the time) have a story about some time in school or at work where they’re given something to do months in advance, not touch it at all, then do all of it the night before, resulting in a shoddy, barely acceptable product and something to laugh about and shake our heads over in hindsight. Some might have a higher stakes story than others (like the time I wrote 80 pages in one night under risk of failing a two semester class in high school), but it’s a pretty common experience that people go through. Something kind of embarrassing that’s amusing in hindsight, that sucks to go through but at the end of the day is your own fault and you come out the other side swearing to never do that again…until the next big project. That’s what people think of as procrastination. That’s what gets internalized about it.
What doesn’t get internalized is how devastating it can be when there isn’t a deadline attached, when you never get to the stage of writing 80 pages in a single night, because there’s no panic attached that drives you to get it done. That sort of procrastination is quieter, doesn’t have the funny payoff, and just festers with that sense of embarrassment over your self-sabotage and curdles to something worse. There’s nothing funny about that, and at times it doesn’t even feel like procrastination.
Sure, you recognize that you’re procrastinating on that project that you’ve always wanted to do when you click on the next youtube video, but the endless cycle gets internalized differently. It gets internalized as you being a failure. A constant fuck-up who can’t reach out and grab the things you want because you’re too lazy, too depressed, too stagnant, too you to even lift your hand to try and reach. But that’s the real face of procrastination, and the process of reinternalizing that perspective can be really empowering. I had a hope when I posted the blog that I might help at least one person look at themselves with that new context. Based on some of the comments I got, that happened for a few people, which made the blog entirely worth it.
The other reason was to hold myself accountable, outline a plan for myself, and get my ass to work. This section is going to shift gears and get into the workings of my schedule and what I’m doing, then vs. now. Which might in fact be super boring for people not named bats. Feel free to skip over it by jumping down to the non-sequitur picture of a lemur.
My initial plan called for scheduling writing time as chunks of time to work, while distancing myself from word counts as the method for setting goals. The argument was that a set amount of time can’t be crammed, so there’s no shortcut-taking for that scheduling, and that good days and bad days would have the same level of personal accomplishment for completion. Planning to write for two hours and following through should ostensibly have the same level of feeling successful whether you get 250 words or 2500 words written in that time, so bad days can happen without having a stigma.
If that sounds good for you personally, by all means go for it, but nine months later, I can say unequivocally that this doesn’t work for me. Couple of reasons for that. First, for me personally, I don’t cram-write when it comes to fiction. If I blather out a sentence and it isn’t working, I don’t say ‘meh, it can wait until edits,’ I go back and fix it so it is working. I don’t rush through to parts I want to write leaving a lean skeleton to fill in later, either. Not that doing either thing is bad form, that just isn’t the way I work as a writer. I’ve tried both things, and find myself unable to keep going until after stuff’s been fixed. Thus, the ‘cutting corners’ argument just doesn’t really apply to me. I don’t need to disincentivize rushing through writing, because the only time I’m writing at a rush is when I’m in a writing flow, which is the least of times when this sort of safety net would need to be there.
And frankly, the second part didn’t prove true, either. On bad days where I only wrote a pittance still felt like failures to me, even if I stuck with the blocked schedule. I’d start in on an hour block, bang my head against it for a while, wish that hour was spent doing anything else, get a tiny bit of writing out, and then look back over the day when I was done and the 250 or so words I got down and say to myself, “I might as well not have written today for all the good that did me.” Thus the supposed incentive of ‘feeling accomplished even on bad days’ wasn’t there. In addition, and perhaps most tellingly, when I scheduled time blocks for writing, I found myself entering this cycle:
1:42 PM: bats is sitting at his computer, feeling bored and not doing anything in particular. “Hm. I should get to writing for the day soon. Okay, let’s schedule an hour block for 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM.” bats nods to himself and continues feeling bored and not doing anything in particular.
1:47 PM: “…I’m kinda hungry and haven’t had lunch yet. I should do that before working. Might have to do that hour from 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM instead, so I can eat first.” bats gets up and starts making something to eat.
1:53 PM: “Yay, food. I should watch something while eating.” bats clicks around youtube until he finds something good to watch, while eating food, finds something right when he’s about to finish, watches it, and the next thing, and the next thing.
2:32 PM “Okay, gonna have a cigarette now and watch another thing, so 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM it is.”
1:15 AM: “…Fuck.”
If I wasn’t such a neurotic weirdo, I might have been more suited to some variation of the Pomodoro Technique, where at that hypothetical 1:42 PM I’d just set a timer for an hour and got to work, but I like round numbers too much and would find myself perpetually pushing off to the next even chunk and wasting time that could have been spent working. Then after wasting enough time getting to that next round mark, failing to get started and pushing off for another half hour.
It wasn’t completely like that, I had limited successes sticking to this plan where I’d have good scheduled writing time, but those were the noteworthy times and the failures were the norm. It just didn’t mesh with my personality.
Part of the reason it didn’t work ties into the second piece of advice/plan for myself I had, which was to remove all obstacles between any given moment and jumping into writing. The scheduled time proved to be an obstacle for me. Rather than just starting work in that moment of ‘I should be working’ self-reflection, I had the (insane, neurotic) obstacle of needing to wait for a nice, round time. So I had to dump it. The rest of the plans for keeping obstacles low have stayed pretty solid—I have right now, in addition to this blog’s document, three other documents open and queued up for writing the moment I decide to start. One of those docs isn’t even a project I’m working on right now, it’s something I’ll be writing a chapter for after I finish working on something else. No obstacles.
So now at that hypothetical 1:42 PM, when I’m getting antsy about not having written anything yet for the day, I can just pop to the current story and have the cursor lined up on the last sentence written. I can’t say I always manage to do that when it strikes me, but I do it enough.
I’ve flirted with developing rituals for closing out of distractions like skype or youtube as the process of starting writing, but I’m not really good at holding to them. I think in my life the only daily ritualized behavior I’ve ever managed to develop and hold onto is brushing my teeth and showering, so I can’t say I’m that surprised.
Also, and maybe this is just a thing with me personally, but I’ve found that shutting those things away makes me less likely to work, like I’m self-flagellating and resentful of it. I’m much more likely to get good work done if I have the option to (and sometimes do) stop randomly to watch some dumb video for five minutes in the middle of a sentence. The pressure valve’s off, and at the end of the day I still have completed work to show for it. The only deprivation necessary is the willpower to start working and the drive to reach the goals I’ve set for myself, it seems.
The last piece was about accountability. I mentioned a self-logging system designed to take word counts as a retroactive figure in the last blog, which was a spreadsheet I threw together. I have since stopped using it for a variety of reasons. While the intention was to promote that accountability by way of scaring myself into making sure I had something to put in while at the same time removing a sense of discouragement since the counts were retroactive. In practice, it didn’t do that. Slips still looked glaring and the weight of them compounded over time. I’m the sort to find extensive records both helpful and soothing, but the daily nature of that specific tracking added much more pressure and led to more and longer slips.
Instead I’ve gone to a daily success check-off system, using HabitRPG (which has been renamed Habitica and is a pretty neat life goal gamification free-to-play thing). That way I could still have a method of logging that accountability, but was basically divorced from specific numbers entirely. The specifics come into play with posting production blogs on the site, which gives me the benefits of that specific tracking, but is at a long and sparse enough scale that bad spots even out, patterns are more long-term, and the positives are more prominent.
As for goals, as mentioned the time blocks plan wasn’t working out, so I have gone back to word count goals. I’ve had a mixed relationship with tracking word counts, but despite that it’s been the method that’s actually worked the best for me. The real trick I found was settling on a number that was both not daunting as a goal, but also actually rewarding to complete. Something that I could face down every day, even on bad days, and say, “Psh, yeah, I can write that much,” without drowning in anxiety, but that when I finished and stopped writing I wouldn’t look back over and think, “Ugh, that’s so little work, I could have not bothered and barely be set back at all.”
Turns out that number is an even 1000 words for me, with the caveat that it’s thought of as two 500 word chunks. I’m not the fastest writer in the world, but I can reasonably count on writing 500 words inside the space of an hour and sometimes in under twenty minutes, so sitting down to write that many isn’t daunting in the slightest, and while knowing I have to do it twice is a little daunting, it’s just barely so and ties into why looking back at 1000 words written for the day feels like a reasonable accomplishment.
It’s not a tremendous one by any means, but it really feels like I’ve made actual progress on a project. Successful writing days feel like I’m getting somewhere. It might not be going the fastest possible, but it’s consistent and will result in shit getting done at an acceptable pace. Which is the real key here, because while I can write over 4000 words in a day (I did so at the start of April during a writing contest window), I cannot do so sustainably, and the goal is consistent work, not flashes of impressive work. Aiming for 1000 words a day is consistently attainable, and consistently empowering.
I’m certainly not perfect at hitting that goal, sometimes for kind of gray reasons like the fact that my method for counting daily word totals is a cheat (short version of explaining said cheat: I round stuff, can go into more detail if you care), to perfectly acceptable ones like spending days editing finished projects rather than writing new material. And of course there are no reason at all days here and there where I just don’t find the time or motivation to work.
The important thing, though, is that it is actually working overall. It’s at a point where I’ve been consistently writing for a long stretch of time now and it feels totally sustainable. I could very well run into additional problems that will result in a struggle, and when I come back to revisit this again at some point down the line, I might be working with a whole new plan and perspective, but for right now, I think I’m actually doing it.
So in taking that experience, here are some changes to my previous advice, if you are also struggling with procrastination and need somewhere to start.
First, maximize your sense of accomplishment in opposition to effort. If what makes you feel the best about having done something for the day is having a lot to show for it, set a tangible goal, like a total word count, or that you will get a full scene written, something that’s an ‘I did this today’ feather in your cap to get pumped up over. If writing isn’t your thing, something tangible to what it is you want to do: a number of finished comic panels, a full painting, a…unit of music that’s reasonable to accomplish in a day by someone who actually knows shit about music. If on the other hand it’s time invested that makes you feel successful, set a specific number of hours to work every day that you can reasonably meet. How much you expect of yourself isn’t the strictly important part. What is important is that this goal be something that you can feel good about having done. That sense of feeling good builds over time, and the better and more accomplished it makes you feel, the bigger a positive effect it will have on you going forward.
At the same time, it needs to be relatively low effort. The biggest obstacle a procrastinator faces is the fear of exerting effort, so you need to be able to bat that fear away easily. What you’re asking yourself to do really isn’t hard enough to get worked up about. Balancing these two axes will probably take some experimentation, because generally speaking the more effort exerted the bigger the pay-off you’ll feel, while conversely less effort tasks don’t feel like an accomplishment. Finding something that maximizes one side while minimizing the other is difficult, and in my experience usually minmaxes in the wrong direction (how many school assignments or work projects have you gotten in your life that are a tremendous amount of work and result in something you don’t give shit about and are sorry you spent the time doing them?), but if you keep that idea in mind when planning things, you have a better chance of figuring out a sustainable work flow.
Consider breaking a medium effort goal down into two or three low effort chunks that you can tackle in a day, which is what I have been doing. Alternately, reconsider what it is you’re trying to accomplish and maximize what it is about the thing that you like so lower effort results in higher accomplishment. Are you a writer who loves writing dialogue but hates description? Consider writing screenplays. Are you a filmmaker that never gets around to shooting things because you’re constantly mired in the script? Consider teaming up with a writer and focusing just on the actually filming process. Are you a…good example of a musician in a similar situation? I…don’t know anything about music. Point is that a more modest goal will carry a higher sense of accomplishment if it’s on a project that innately has more value to you, while the exact same goal on a project that’s a mixed bag might feel lackluster. This could apply to switching up a project within the same field, if that project carries different external accomplishments. I’ve taken breaks from novel-writing to work on short stories, solely for the aspect of ‘this is something that will be finished quickly’ making the daily goal’s ramifications different for a little while.
Second, make yourself accountable to the goals you’ve set. Consider setting up a way to track your daily efforts, maybe in a spreadsheet, or maybe with a gamified system (such as Habitica), or by using some other time management system like Getting Things Done. Accountability is a really great motivation tool if utilized correctly, not only to force getting started every day but also to look back and say ‘this is working.’ It can also help heighten the sense of accomplishment (getting XP and gold in Habitica for completing stories is a nice bonus). And a big part of the value of systems like this is that they are good way to naturally break larger projects down into component parts and make them less daunting. That’s almost entirely the purpose of Getting Things Done, for example.
Involving other people in your accountability can be good to consider, too. The main reason why I post production blogs is to involve y’all in my accountability. Even if nobody says a word on those blogs or even looks at them, just putting the information out there makes me want to be damn sure I have something to show for it. It doesn’t have to be a blog, see if a friend you talk to regularly will be open to you using them as a sounding board for your work goals. If you’re both struggling, you can push each other to succeed. Hell, you could even badger each other into putting down the video games and getting something done, if you’re both up for giving and receiving good-natured antagonism.
Third, and somewhat controversial and will probably be a point of further reflection down the road, add more work. In the last few months I’ve taken on a new project I’m working on concurrently to all my writing, that notably is only tangentially related to writing. This extra project has roughly doubled the amount of stuff that I’ve been expecting of myself per day, but from entirely different angles. This seems on the surface like a terrible idea that occurred during a mania and would doom me to failure. But it’s had the opposite effect.
Having the variety of things to do has resulted in me throwing in more time and energy biting off chunks of work to get them done, and then working on a different thing afterwards. Where before I might write a 500 word chunk, dick around for two hours, then write the second chunk, I’m more likely to dick around for half an hour and get back to writing, and then dive into the other project for a while. More things to do, and the clock is ticking. The variation is a bonus on that, because the day’s stuff still doesn’t feel daunting—there’s no “I have to write how many words for today to be successful?!” there’s just several small things that I want to do.
If you’re the sort like me who has a lot of free time but fails to utilize it correctly, try adding more things you want to get done, rather than the natural inclination to scale back and devote yourself to something super modest and focused. Maybe you’re suffocating under the expectation of the One Thing, or maybe you’re just left at too loose of ends by the free time. Filling up that free time with a bunch of stuff that’s fun and productive makes it less like I’m either working OR goofing off, and more that I’m getting to choose from a sample plate of fun and engaging activities to do.
This is still a new space for me, and maybe my thoughts on specifics will coalesce better over time. Provided it doesn’t prove to be a terrible idea in the long-run.
And the last piece of advice is exactly the same as last time.
Just start. Right now. Drop what you’re doing, pull up your project, and just start. One of the heaviest and hardest parts of dealing with procrastination is getting lost in the plans for working eventually, the day-dreaming of what it’ll be like when you’re all done doing a thing, the very first move off into the Dark Woods. That first step is always the hardest every single day, so just do it. Stop thinking, do it now.
That’s it for this one. If you’ve got your own advice, once again, please share. These sorts of things are highly personal and what works for me isn’t the ‘right’ way, just ‘a’ way, and other plans and systems might be exactly what someone else needs to hear to get up and running.
TTFN.
*signs up for Habitica in the middle of reading this blog*
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Also, I just want you to know that every time I read or hear the words "lit a fire under my ass" or similar, my imagination conjures a vivid scene in third person of someone lighting a Zippo lighter and holding the flame directly up to my
...if I gotta see it you at least gotta read about it, brother.
Anyway, on to less ridiculous things, thank you so much for writing these blogs. Several months ago I tried to fix some of my issues by keeping timelogs of everything I did, but that quickly spiraled out of control and I gave it up. Most of my problems revolve around getting enough to eat and drink and getting enough sleep, or at least it feels that way, so I think those will be my first couple Dailies in Habitica. After that maybe I can move on to actually doing things I like with my free time. In any case, this blog came at basically exactly the right time to, well... Light a fire under my ass. So thanks. I think I'm gonna go play my guitar for the first time in months now. Let's see if that habit sticks.
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This is why it's dangerous to float six feet in the air with your ass pointing down at a Metal concert. The ballads are a bitch.
3929185 It's especially bad if you've eaten a bean burrito!
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But how the hell else am I gonna float six feet in the air at a concert? Answer me that, smart guy.
3929223 Internet.
OMG Habitica! I was facing a similar problem to you with procrastination (this time with - shudder - marking. Eugh) and was finding myself playing Skyrim for ridiculous amounts of time to get my mind off of that fact that I was accomplishing a big fat nothing. Then it hit me - I was more than happy enough to go complete pointless or meandering fetch quests in a video game (20 Jazby grapes? Ha, lady, that is no problem - let me just go futz around the wilderness slaughtering bears and dragons, collecting flowers I'll never need, and trying to keep my trigger-happy dog alive for a few hours while I go get those for you). So I started googling something that would give me silly rewards for completing my own daily "fetch quests" or "leveling up" a skill. It's been pretty helpful, that's for sure.
Also, your comments on internalized procrastination angst over the long term (when there is no external deadline) spoke to me on a spiritual level. I'm getting better, but damn, it can be rough sometimes.
Thank you for sharing, really - as asshole-ish as it sounds, it's sometimes nice to hear that others somehow have the same issues as you.
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I don't think that's assholish at all. Part of what makes that cycle of self-defeat so crushing is how lonely it is. This is a problem where talking about it is kind of taboo, not in a traditional taboo sense, but in the sense that it's our fault. I certainly can't blame anybody else but me for only writing 150 words today (...I had to go to both the pet store and the grocery store, that's my story and I'm sticking to it), that was my fault, and it was caused by one of western culture's SEVEN DEADLY SINS. So people don't talk about it, or try to exclusively couch it in that internalized funny-story version in a self-effacing way, while leaving the crushing part as a small, private, personal tragedy. It gets transformed into "something wrong with me."
The flipside is that when you do see that other people go through the same thing, that personal tragedy is suddenly validated. You're not alone, others face the same personal tragedy. Knowing that is empowering, it turns the "something wrong with me" into "a problem some humans face." Taking on and overcoming it is so much easier to visualize and attempt when you know you're not alone.