Once again, I’m writing at bedtime—my bedtime, which is past the time when the day officially ends. December 2 is just coming to a close for me. December 3 will start after one sleep.
December 2′s prompt comes from Leo Babuta: Writing. What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing—and can you eliminate it?
My answer is easy to identify and difficult to conquer: Cringing in fear. Most people call it procrastination, and Barbara Sher, one of my favorite authors, calls it resistance, but I know that it’s fear, pure and simple. I’m afraid to write what I most want to write. the more I want it, the more I fear—fear that it can’t possibly be as good on the page or on the screen as it is in my head, and even greater fear that it will be exactly that good, and people will hate me for seeming better than them, or for saying something so strongly.
When I get scared, I do anything I can to avoid writing. The worst offenders are the tasks that accomplish very little, like driving aimlessly, reading every entry on Failbook.com or FML, watching mindless TV. Sometimes I do great, useful things while I’m trying not to write, like going for a run, practicing my guitar, designing a new knitted hat, or calling an old friend, but knowing that I’m doing it for the sake of running away, rather than running towards the good things, steals some of the joy out of the task. And in any case, I become increasingly guilty and stressed out because I haven’t written. If it’s professional work I’m trying not to write, I will get it done by the deadline, but with more stress and less devoted time than I wish I’d had. If it’s personal writing, it often doesn’t get done at all.
Can I eliminate this? Probably not entirely. If I knew how to simply get rid of the fear, I would have done so years ago, and saved a lot of wasted time. So far, the procrastination activities are what I need to do to calm the fear enough to allow myself to write. I will work on finding the best, most efficient ways to get past the fear. I will try to streamline the process. This is my project for the coming year, and probably for the rest of my life.
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December 3, 2010 at 10:48 am
Tim Nordloh
I found a book a couple years ago, called “Getting Things Done” by Paul Allen, which has some excellent advice on the “resistance”, and points out the psychic drag that unfinished tasks have on our mind. This book is referenced a lot in the community of ‘life hackers’, who try to use technology, not for technology’s sake, but as a sort of life enhancement. Lifehack dot org has a posts on your topic, related to combating that part of our minds that is self-defeating, or on ways to try and inspire yourself to actually get work done during your workday
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Essentially, if we have things in our lives that we are feeling guilt for not doing, then we have trouble focusing our whole minds on the tasks that we know we ‘should’ be doing, what the author calls a ‘psychic burden’. So the book goes through a procedure for purging all the ‘to-do’ items we have.
He also has advice for using time efficiently, like if you are having a low-energy day, it’s a good day to do some filing, or clean out the email inbox. what’s really great about him is, while the book is written for business managers and such, he says that you should fully concentrate on the task at hand, such as enjoying a day at the beach with family. He tries to get you to organize your life so that you CAN enjoy such things, by lifting that psychic burden that accompanies unfinished tasks.
December 3, 2010 at 11:16 am
Tim Nordloh
Um, Tim, I think you meant David Allen. Cripes.
December 5, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Anita Harkess
Thanks, Tim! I listened to David Allen’s GTD as an audiobook about a year back, but I think it would work much better in print, where I could refer back to things and study the ones that work for me. I’ll look for a copy of the print version and check out the advice on fighting resistance.