Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Are You a Procrastinator?

Well, I can be. Never with work, of course…well, hardly ever. But sometimes, when the Muse isn’t pounding down my door with ideas for stories, blogs, articles, etc, I do find it easy to be distracted when I’m sitting at my computer. It’s not just a quick game of Mahjong or Free Cell any more. There are many interesting sites on the web – if you’re interested in tennis, skiing, baseball, horses, flying, cooking – you name it, there’s a site you can find with all kinds of info and some have training videos available – fifteen minutes have disappeared in a blink while you learned how to follow through on your golf swing!

And, of course, those sites often have links to their Facebook page, Twitter, YahooGroups discussion groups. Before you know it, a quick little glance at how to make angel food cake has you signed up for online cooking lessons and you’re fifteen posts into a discussion on the merits of butter cream versus cream cheese frosting.

It’s fine to say, just apply willpower and get to work on that review you’ve promised, the blog that’s waiting to be posted, the first three chapters you told your crit partner you’d have to her last week. Then that email alarm sounds and you see someone has said the only real frosting for a cake is their grandmother’s seven-minute frosting. How can you not look at that recipe?

Here are a couple of suggestions on how to work through the procrastination.

1 – I can write whatever I want on the assignment hanging over my head. I can write the love scene I know is coming up in my WIP, even if my characters aren’t there yet, or the beginning of an article on squirrels or the first paragraph of my column. It doesn’t have to be perfect; it doesn’t even have to be something I’ll end up sending out, but it does get me writing.

2 – I can online browse at a specific time, but not before. That can be tough because you can find yourself watching the time.

3 – This one is a bit of an oddity, but it can work. Tell yourself you’re NOT allowed to write until a specific time. By the time the designated hour arrives, say 7:37 pm, you could be chomping at the bit to get those ideas onto your hard drive.

So…what gets your fingers moving when you’re procrastinating?

Libby McKinmer
Romance with an edge
www.libbymckinmer.com
libby@libbymckinmer.com
Also on Facebook, Twitter & Good Reads

8 comments:

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Marilyn Meredith a.k.a. F. M. Meredith said...

I always have other things I think ought to done before I get to work. I do best if I turn off Facebook and my email and then write.

Morgan Mandel said...

I confess, I'm very guilty, but figure life has to be lived and somehow everything will fall into place!

Morgan Mandel
http://morganmandel.blogspot.com
http://www.morganmandel.com

Earl Staggs said...

Libby, God must have loved procrastinators. He made an awful lot of us.

Jean Henry Mead said...

Guilty as charged. I love to write but I put it off by answering email, recording books sales and commenting on my favorite blogs.

Earl's right. There are a lot of us. :)

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Mahjong is a fantastic game, I sometimes say the same, Im only going to play one game, and when I look at the clock, 2 hours passed by.

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