All writers procrastinate. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a big liar or writing to avoid some even more onerous chore. It’s OK, really. I had a teacher in grad school—it was this guy; you may have heard of him. Good teacher, good writer. Anyway, he suggested that for many of us procrastination is part of our method and we need to accept that and work with it instead of struggling to overcome it.
Sorry, were you looking for advice on how to break the habit? Yeah, no, not here. I understand there’s a group that meets in the Methodist church basement up on the hill every Thursday. You could try there. They won’t be able to help you, either, but they do serve donuts. For those of you who have embraced your inner slacker, I have a few suggestions to make living with the condition a bit less painful. Pulling all-nighters is OK in college, but past age 40 the aftermath is really unpleasant, especially if you have kids who still expect you to feed them and walk them to school.
- Make a list. Don’t bother dividing it up into days because the Monday stuff is just going to slide on into Tuesday, and then you have to rearrange everything.
- Put everything on the list, including items such as “eat lunch” and “walk the dog” that you have to do. Include a few things that you don’t strictly speaking have to do, but you know you’re going to do anyway, like “hit the nearest coffee shop for caffeine and sugar” and “watch CinemaSins on YouTube.” That way, you won’t feel demoralized at the end of the day when your list isn’t any shorter than it was at the beginning.
- Take the big ugly jobs, like “write first draft of novel” and break them into slightly more manageable tasks, like “create outline” or “revise Chapter 2.” Sometimes you have to break it down to “write one goddamn paragraph.”
- Know your limits. If you’ve been writing on deadline for awhile, you have a feel for how long any job is going to take, and you know precisely when you have to get started thinking about how long you can put this thing off. Personally, I prefer tight deadlines these days because it saves me some trouble. Having too much time between beginning a project and hitting the Send button on the final revision is just inviting disaster. Anything can happen. It’s so tempting to push yourself, to say, “I did one just like this in four weeks; I can get started in D minus three and a half this time.” I won’t say don’t do it because we’re all functioning procrastinators here, but slack in small increments, my friends.
- Get a support network. No, not those donut-eating losers in the church basement; find some real friends, either online or flesh and blood, who maybe also work from home editing books or writing books or building custom birdcages out of recycled scrap metal. That way, they will sympathize when you email them to suggest a recon mission to the beach or the last remaining used bookstore in town but will be too busy with their own deadlines to actually take you up on it.
- Get curious. I have a report on impingement mortality and entrainment for seawater intakes to edit. What is that exactly? What does “fecundity hindcast” mean? No idea, but I sort of want to find out. That’s how I got into this writing and editing gig, to learn new things, and I suspect that’s why you’re here, too.
- So get back to work. You took a break. Breaks are good. Thanks for reading! But I got a deadline to catch.