I consider myself to be a legendary procrastinator. There are things I have been working on for years—at this rate—that I tend to kick down the road to future Michael. My Intro to Yo-Yoing book and video project, for instance. It’s both on my desk in physical form because I think that may help me see the work in progress as a physical object and motivate me, and it’s on my laptop so I can update it and improve it.
Instead of working on that, I will find myself listening to David Perell, Tim Ferriss, or Richard Dawkins podcasts. I will suddenly binge-watch an entire series I saw a few episodes of a decade ago and can’t put off finding the end of the story. I’ll sit down and read the Dune book in three days, telling myself I have been meaning to read it for years and I might as well get that done. Sometimes I’ll clean up my room or fold laundry. These are easier to justify, but it’s still procrastinating finishing a project I tell myself I want to do.
Writing essays is another task I tell myself I want to do. I would ideally write something to publish once a day to get down the practice of writing and improve that skill. Instead of that, I do a lot of the above-mentioned things or rationalize that it’ll be easier to write before I go to bed and do other things until then. But when bedtime gets closer, I realize that it’s going to be at least an hour before I finish and can sleep, and that it would be better for me to wait until tomorrow—for fear of doing a bad, half-asleep job on whatever it is I was hypothetically going to write that day.
The other task is eBay. I would like to list ten items a day. That takes about two hours to do. Once I sit down to do it, it’s easy to stay there and hammer through five, take a break, and come back and do the last five. But walking the five feet from my desk chair to my photo box chair and simply starting feels incredibly difficult to do often. I haven’t listed anything since the previous weekend at this rate. I have sold and fulfilled orders. And I can look at that and use it to justify that “at least I touched my eBay account today,” but it’s not building my inventory, which is the thing I feel is most important when it comes to that job.
I have thousands of items to be listing, and perhaps I’m looking at that mountain instead of the next ten cards. I read Atomic Habits by James Clear a while ago and have used it as my foot in the door to get myself doing something. Perhaps ten cards—while I know it’s what I ought to be doing to move this work forward—is just a little too much to encourage me to simply get started. I know I could at least list one card a day. I also know that even though I can make that a goal for myself, I’m aware that I actually mean “sit there and work for a long time,” and so I tend to stay at the desk chair, reading, watching, and listening to content that keeps me from making a dent on the work that matters. Or that I tell myself matters.
Steven Pressfield calls this inability to sit down and work a product of the Resistance. He says it’s a force of nature that fights us and keeps us where we are—or even moving backwards and away from those things we want, the person we could be. I don’t know truly what I want long term, and I can’t imagine who I would be. Perhaps that’s a piece of my issue here. But I do agree that I have some form of Resistance and that after a few days or weeks of succumbing to it, I start to beat myself up over it. But that also doesn’t get me closer to my goals—micro though they may be.
What do you do to overcome your own resistance, procrastination, and creative avoidance? How do you make it more likely that you’ll simply start and get the ball rolling? I feel like having places where I do specific things helps, and having the minimum daily practice helps, but I would love to hear what others do to get themselves going towards their self-defined objectives.