It’s Not Even Funny Anymore

Uh-oh. Guess which one mine is.

I cannot believe how indifferent I am to writing these days. I have free time most evenings, but I’m not using it at all. I have ideas, I know what I want to write, I just.don’t.feel.like.it. And I feel guilty about it, because I’ve already taken so much time, time that I could have chosen to spend with my family or friends or doing other, productive things, but I didn’t because I felt like this all needed to get out of my head. Now that I’m halfway my momentum has completely stalled and I feel like if I’m not going to continue, then all that time could have been put to better use. Yesterday I had every intention of writing – I had almost three hours set aside – but I kept putting it off, putting it off. Even the threat of having my pie taken away if I didn’t write something wasn’t enough to get me going. I just went pieless. Now I’m sitting here again, in my writing spot, with my writing blanket and my writing laptop perched on my writing legs (okay I don’t have special legs just for writing) I’m procrastinating. First I had bills to pay, then I had some very important facebook things to look at, and now I’m blogging about my failure to progress, despite the fact that everything is in order for me to ACTUALLY WRITE except my brain. My brain wants to check today’s Wimbledon scores and read DYAC. What’s going on, brain? Why haven’t you wanted to write for the past two weeks? Don’t you want pie? Is this a normal thing everyone goes through sometimes, or should I start getting worried? I want to finish. I WANT TO FINISH. Just… not now.

I’m going to open my doc and stare at it until it shames me into writing something, even if it’s only 200 words. Maybe a tiny nudge will get the ball rolling again.

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2 Comments

  1. Jackie

    Good call on just opening it up and getting going. Often it’s just that small initiation piece that’s the most difficult to get past. It’s why I never exercise deliberately.

    I learned about a very simple technique call “opposite action” which may help you to get through procrastination spells. You know when you’re feeling sad about something, you tend to want to listen to sad music because it suits your mood? That’s all find and good… except it isn’t. Listening to the sad music–even though that’s what you feel like doing–just reinforces a negative pattern, which in turn makes your sad mood feel deeper and last longer. “Opposite action” is a skill used to break that pattern by doing the opposite of what you’re feeling in order to create a new, more positive pattern. So instead of sad music, you put on something more upbeat. It may not fix all your problems and you may still feel upset, but you’re not going to get deeper into those sad feelings by reinforcing them.

    This can be applied to procrastination, I think. First, you need to be aware of what you’re feeling (“I feel like procrastinating” or “I don’t feel like writing quiiiiiiiite yet”) and then make the conscious decision to do the opposite (“Even though I don’t want to, I’m going to open up my laptop and just start writing”). I find it helpful to actually name the skill I’m about to use and say to myself “I’m going to use opposite action now” and then decide what that action it going to be. The MOST IMPORTANT THING though, is to make sure you follow through with your action. Don’t just say you’re going to do something, actually do it. Right away. Don’t overthink it, don’t make excuses to put it off another 5 minutes or 1 minute or 15 seconds, do it as soon as you name the action. And if you don’t do it right away, then don’t spend the rest of the day beating yourself up about it, just name the opposite action again and give it another try. You’ll find success with it at some point or another, guaranteed.

    Good luck! Hope you got your 200 words done, or more. 🙂

    • I did, in fact I wrote over 1,000, and I’m babysitting for friends tonight so I’ll get the same amount again done, easily. And yeah, opposite action works for me every time, it’s just making myself do it it…

      PS: I got an email about this comment and almost deleted it for spam because it was longer than the usual one-line comments I usually get! And I totally didn’t notice it was your name and email address :/ MOAR SLEEP NOW.

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