I’ve been putting off writing this post today. Mostly because I’m on the road, but also because I can be a brilliant procrastinator. However, I have fought my urge to defer it until tomorrow or occupy myself with other tasks.
So why do we procrastinate? It’s not always down to laziness or distraction, as quite often we put off the very tasks or projects that are most meaningful to us.
Procrastination is a sophisticated form of resistance, also known as creativity’s evil twin. Resistance will try anything to stop us becoming who we really are. It will pull us away from the painting, make us stare blankly at an empty page, convince us we need to spend weeks doing research before we can start a project.
Once procrastination sets in, it’s hard to shift. But here’s an idea from Gretchen Rubin, best-selling author of The Happiness Project. If you want to get yourself to do something, make the alternative to that task to do nothing.
This works well if you’re the kind of person who will clean your house, answer all your emails and surf the Internet rather than getting down to what you’re actually supposed to be doing.
If your project involves writing, take yourself out of the house to, say, a library, where you will either write or sit doing nothing. In fact, staring at a wall will help you break through your resistance because you will not be doing anything at all. Just being. And that’s when inspiration can bubble up.
The worst mistake you can make is to start telling yourself you’ve got to write, and letting your inner critic give you an ear-bashing.
So how did I beat my resistance to writing this post? I checked into a quiet hotel, waited for my husband to fall asleep, let go of the need to know what I was going to write and allowed it to gently arise while listening to the birds singing.
Today I have wrestled with the beast and won. But tomorrow is another day…
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