Once, a long time
ago, I had a crippling bout of procrastination.
I had just gotten a grant to work on my writing, the money was going to
last for a year so all of a sudden I didn’t have to be anywhere, didn’t
have to go to a job or try to get a job, and I somehow got into a vicious cycle
where I couldn’t make myself do anything productive at all. When I was right on the edge of it I put my
dirty dishes in the sink and covered them with soapy water and there they sat,
smelling worse and worse, for about three days, while I sat in a chair in my
living room feeling crippled with ennui and guilt. Two things helped me get out of it: One was that I called a friend, a guy who
worked as a “shovel bum” in the office of the State Archeologist where I’d had
my most recent job, and told him about my problem. “I’d do the dishes first,” he said, in a
cheerful practical, non-judging way, and somehow the fact that he told me
exactly what to do without judgment or any kind of controlling, gave me the
energy to get up and do the dishes. The
other thing that helped was that as I was sitting in my chair, unable to do
anything but sit there except eventually the dishes, I started reading The Shining by Steven King. That book scared me so much it totally
changed my mental landscape and by the time I had finished reading it I was in
a completely different place -- maybe it’s not possible to hold boredom and
terror in your mind at the same time. All
I know is that after I did my dishes and finished that book I was able to pick
myself up, apply myself to my new life where I had all my time to write, and be
energetic and productive again.
I’m not sure how
much of that story can be applied to someone else’s situation, except to say that
maybe when you get into a place of procrastination, you should try calling a
friend, someone practical and nonjudgmental, and ask them what to do
first. Or maybe you should just ask
yourself: Pick only one thing to do –
the bare minimum that you can get by with on that day – and do that. Then let yourself off the hook for the rest
of the day. I do believe that scaling back
to the bare minimum and deciding to let yourself not do the rest – just for
today -- is a good idea when you really don’t feel like doing anything. I think that’s because guilt and negative self-talk
– although it might seem like they’re helping you by trying to motivate you –
may actually be the very thing that’s keeping you from being productive.
Consider (and maybe see my August 6, 2012
post, “The Power of Flexibility”): If
you tie a monkey to a tree it’ll try to get away, but if you leave the monkey
alone near the tree, its own curiosity will propel it toward it. Both the tree and the monkey are parts of
you. The tree is what you think you
should be doing, what you think you must do in order to be a good, successful,
whatever person, and the monkey is your will, the part of you that wants to do
something or not do something. If you
keep tying the monkey to the tree – i.e., telling it over and over that it
should be doing a certain list of things, if you keep beating the monkey with a
figurative stick because it won’t do those things, it’ll just keep trying to
get away. So you need to find some way
to make the monkey want to do what it needs to do.
When you’ve been
stuck in ennui and inertia (what they call sloth in the Bible, one of the seven
deadly sins – how’s that for monkey-beating language?), the first step in getting
back your motivation is probably to let your inner monkey off its chain. This might look like deciding that, just for
today, you’re not going to do all those things you think you should do, ought
to do, need to do, and pick one small thing that you do actually want to
do. (This may be surprisingly hard –
sometimes our sense that we’re supposed to do some thing or things is so strong
we can’t let go of the idea that we must make ourselves do it today – then we
get stuck longer in the whole inertia cycle.)
And maybe – this
is even harder – you could try doing absolutely nothing for a whole day.
Someone I know
once told me that she spent a whole Saturday lying around watching TV and not
doing anything else, not because she wanted to, but because she couldn’t make
herself do anything different. She had a busy full-time job, a live-in
partner, and no kids – if you have kids it’s a whole different story, I know,
but maybe there are things those of us with kids can learn from her story too; we’ll
talk about that another day.
My friend said she
felt really bad and guilty doing nothing all day. She kept worrying about what she needed to
do, but somehow she couldn’t stop just sitting on her couch watching TV. Then the next day, which was Sunday, she was
almost supernaturally productive and energized:
She cleaned every single room in her house, cleaned out her refrigerator
and a closet, caught up on some old emails, and did a whole bunch of other
stuff she’d been putting off for a long time.
Just hearing that
story gave me a visceral feeling of relief – a good, happy, relaxed-inner-monkey
kind of feeling. And I knew there was
something there for all of us to learn – something about the soil lying fallow
for a while in order to produce a good crop, about renewal and regeneration and
the fact that it really, really is okay – maybe even necessary – for us to take
time to rest. It might even help us get
a whole lot more done. And it might not
cure every case of procrastination but it could be a good place to start.
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