PROCRASTINATION: THE WRITER’S ARCHENEMY

Procrastination is like the devil in the Bible book of Genesis; it subtly creeps in, distracts you from what you should be doing to make progress on that project, and attracts the curse of toiling your eyeballs out, the night before the deadlines. No occupational category is immune to procrastination, but writers seem especially prone. From Agatha Christie to Margaret Atwood to Tom Wolfe to (more recently) Chibuzor Ndubisi—who reportedly completed some of his essay entries at the choke of a deadline—and Drucker Challenge winner, God’sWill Dickson—who once joked (to his own spite): “I have been such a procrastinator, I doubt that I’d die early!”—, procrastination is so prevalent that it has its own brand of humor. Haven’t you heard the most infamous of all procrastination jokes? I’ll tell you later. (You’ll have to read that twice to get it. LOL.)

The vicious cycle of all procrastination begins with something like this: at the start of a writing project, time is abundant. You wallow in its elastic embrace. You make a few attempts at getting down to it, but nothing makes you feel wholeheartedly engaged. If there was a way to forget about it, you would; but you don’t want to seem a coward, so you set a date when you plan to begin work. Then when that day arrives, you suddenly don’t feel like it. You can’t get traction. Maybe there’s no inspiration. So, you forward your task to a day with more chunks of time, only to find that every tomorrow seems to have the same twenty-four hours. At the end of each of these days, you face the disquieting mystery of where time went. This goes on for a while.

Eventually, time’s limited nature increases its value before your eyes. That very pressure makes it hard to get started. You really want to get going but you’d rather take on peripheral chores: maybe clean your room or your WhatsApp inbox or cook or find someone to discuss with. Part of you knows this isn’t what you should be doing, and so you say to yourself, “I know myself: I am just doing this to prepare; when it’s time I’ll get the piece written.” Finally, it is too late in the day to really get started, so you may as well go to bed. And the cycle of avoidance starts again tomorrow. Sometimes, to quell your anxiety, you give in to total diversion. Pleasure turns to powerlessness as you become unable to extract yourself. And as the deadline approaches, you make the diversions more intense so that they will sufficiently distract you. Banishing anything that reminds you of the dreaded project, you shun your to-do lists and timetables. In a willful distortion of reality, you shift your plans from what you once could solidly accomplish to what is minimally possible. Unfortunately, “this” never ends. Secretly, you are full of self-recrimination and self-doubt, envious of other people who simply get things done.

…energy builds until finally a threshold is crossed and something clicks. You start working. Because there are no more moments to spare, you wade into the work, making ruthless decisions and astonishing progress. In place of that menacing cloudiness, a glittering clarity comes over you. There is purity to your work, fueled by the real urgency of now or never. For a lucky few, this surge of efficiency will enable them to get the project done. For others, this initial rush wanes before the cursed thing is completed: after too many hours of sleepless concentration, brains shut down. (Caffeine and coffee cola can only carry them so far.) Then, just before the time elapses, you limp across the finish line with insufficient preparation, giving the world your second best.

So, there it is. Procrastination is subtle and pervasive. So subtle and pervasive, in fact, that if I recommend that you read Piers Steel’s book, The Procrastination Equation, to gain a deeper insight into how to tackle/overcome it, you’ll procrastinate on reading that, too. (You’re welcome to prove me wrong).

Written by God’s will Dickson