NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION: PROCRASTINATION?
(Posted 2008-01-02 20:16:52 by Ray Lopez)
Happy New Year! I generally do not do the "new year resolutions" thing,
but this year I really do need to focus on one aspect of my personality
that has caused me much heartburn: being a procrastinator.
Googling for "procrastination" tells me that this is a common problem, one
that the Internet doesn't do much to help with. I can't tell you how many
hours I have idled away just playing with StumbleUpon.
Most of the procrastination resources on the Internet seem to point to the
same solution to the problem: Just do it. There is really little in the way
of underlying explanations for why we procrastinate. But there is a lot of
advice out there simply telling the procrastinator to get over it, stick to
a plan, and make things happen.
In my case, I procrastinate most when it comes to writing. I am working on
a couple of writing projects, and they have been stalled for a year now,
simply because I am either too tired or unmotivated to write. The plethora
of advice on the Net for unmotivated, procrastinating authors all boils
down to trying to find the right set of tools and techniques to just do it,
to just write.
Such advice has been very unhelpful to me, probably because I don't like
being told what to do, and just want to do things my way. That in and of
itself is a problem, of course, one that I need to get over.
However, somewhere in that affective state of wanting to do things my way,
lies the answer to my problem. Somehow, I've always wanted time to sort of
magically alter itself for me, so that I could write whenever I felt like
it. But the reality is that I need to do my writing around my day job, and
around my obligations as a husband and father of two young kids. What I
really resent, then, are the impositions of Life Itself, the demands of
work and family life. I resent how those impositions seemingly block my
ability to write.
Time for a reality check. Reality is what we make it, and life experiences
are entirely based upon how we choose to react. The reality is, if I did
not spend so much time goofing off on the Internet, I could probably spend
at least 30 minutes a day writing, and probably more. Thirty minutes a day
adds up to 182 hours a year, or 22.75 workdays! While I could probably not
finish a book in 22.75 workdays, I could at the very least get a very, very
good start on it. And that is just working 30 minutes per day!
Thinking further, I guesstimate I would need about 320 work hours total to
finish one of my books. That works out to just under one hour per day. If
I really want to write this book, then I simply need to focus one hour per
day on writing, instead of doing all of the other time-wasting things I do.
Overall, I think that most of the advice to "just do it" with regards to
procrastination are correct. What is missing is that each of us needs to
go through a process of understanding the reasons why we procrastinate, and
understanding how much the procrastination is costing. Those reasons are
probably as varied as human experience itself, hence the dearth of
information on how to deal with the underlying reasons for procrastination.
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