The art of defeating procrastination

There are days when the brain simply refuses to cooperate. You’ve got work to do, ideas to develop, perhaps something genuinely worthwhile to create. And yet you find yourself three hours deep into reading blogs, reorganizing your bookmarks or investigating something so spectacularly irrelevant that you’ve forgotten what you were supposed to be doing in the first place.

Say hello to procrastination. Pull up a chair. You’ve probably been sitting in it all morning.

It’s not a disease exclusive to writers. Anyone attempting creative work knows the feeling. The blank page, the unfinished project, the nagging suspicion that you should be doing something important. Anything really, except what you’re currently doing.

Procrastination is a remarkably effective mood enhancer. For about five minutes. It offers the cheap satisfaction of avoiding something unpleasant, followed by the considerably less pleasant realization that the work is still there. Waiting. Like an unpaid bill or an angry landlord. And time, unfortunately, is the one commodity nobody’s making more of.

The uncomfortable truth is that procrastination usually begins somewhere between your ears. Anxiety is often the culprit. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear that whatever you’re about to create won’t live up to the magnificent masterpiece you’ve already constructed in your imagination.

Acknowledging that fear is a decent start. Understanding what’s lurking behind it is even better. After all, the monster under the bed tends to look considerably less terrifying once you’ve switched on the lights.

Then there’s FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out. The irresistible urge to keep up with every blog, every conversation, every fascinating little distraction the Internet has to offer. Because surely something important must have happened in the last seven minutes. Probably not. Meanwhile, the elusive creative flow, that wonderful state where hours disappear and good work seemingly happens by itself, remains just out of reach.

Of course, sometimes the enemy isn’t inside your head. Sometimes it’s sitting in the next cubicle, scheduling a meeting. In his TED Talk, “Why work doesn’t happen at work”, Jason Fried identifies two particularly effective assassins of productivity: Managers and Meetings. The dreaded M&Ms. Fried compares creative flow to a good night’s sleep. You can’t simply switch it on and off at will. It takes time to get there, and interruptions drag you back to the beginning. Imagine someone waking you up every twenty minutes to ask how the sleeping is going. Welcome to the modern office.

Get up from the comfy place and get to work.

Perfectionism is another reliable accomplice. You want everything to be flawless, so you keep planning, researching, reconsidering and polishing ideas that haven’t even made it onto the page. Eventually, you’ve achieved the remarkable feat of being completely exhausted without having produced a damn thing.

Large projects are particularly good at inspiring “analysis paralysis”. Faced with an enormous task, the temptation to do absolutely nothing can become overwhelming. The conventional wisdom is to break the work into smaller pieces. Sensible advice. But it doesn’t necessarily address the real problem: why are you so reluctant to begin?

And then there’s the most insidious form of procrastination: pretending to work. Michael Lopp describes this beautifully in his article A Precious Hour, introducing the concept of the Faux-Zone. It’s that seductive state where you’re busy, engaged and enjoying all the psychological rewards of productivity while accomplishing practically nothing of creative value.

You’re answering emails, organizing files, checking feeds, tweaking settings. Everything feels terribly important. Except the actual work. It’s productivity theater, and you’re both the star performer and the only person buying tickets.

One possible escape route is the Pomodoro Technique. The idea is almost offensively simple: set a kitchen timer for 25 minutes and work. Nothing else. No distractions, no wandering off into the digital wilderness. When the timer rings, take a short break and repeat.

There’s something appealing about reducing the grand struggle against human nature to a cheap kitchen timer. No elaborate productivity system, no expensive seminar, no inspirational guru promising to transform your life before lunch. Just you, the work, and the relentless ticking of a clock.

Of course, none of this guarantees creative brilliance. But it might get you started, which is more than can be said for another afternoon spent researching how to become productive. Now stop reading about procrastination. You’ve got work to do.