Reverb 10 December 20--Beyond Avoidance

Beyond Avoidance What should you have done this year but didn’t because you were too scared, worried, unsure, busy or otherwise deterred from doing? (Bonus: Will you do it?) (Author: Jake Nickell)

Ha!  Are they kidding?  Just check my posts under "procrastination."  Maybe  "fears" and "overcoming fears," too.  This avoidance thing is where I excel!

What I've avoided this year, often because of being tired, distracted, disorganized and generally unsure of myself:

• Writing a book
• Cleaning my house
• Creating and offering online workshops
• Writing an e-book course
• Finishing Kelly Rae Roberts' "Flying Lessons" course
• Losing weight
• Starting an exercise program

I'm just going to stop there.  It's depressing.  It's a lifelong problem I am working to overcome.  Yes, I intend to do many of these things in the coming weeks, months, year.

One thing I will make note of--I think I've mentioned this before: I believe all of my incompletes all track back to an inner lack of feeling secure, nurtured and confident. So a lot of my focus is going to be on learning to care for myself, creating the support I need to accomplish my goals, and boosting my belief in myself and my self-confidence.  I'll keep you posted on how it's going.

Goals and Jellyfish

I am feeling like a jellyfish today.  Amorphous and pulled by the currents, not moving toward anything in particular of my own accord.

I've really gotten nothing done today, and it's aggravating.  I know the reasons.  I don't have anything pressing just now, and no outside deadlines which makes it even harder for me to buckle down.  I'm a bit tired, so focus is lacking in general at the moment.  I have short-timers disease because I have a four day weekend coming up.  None of this makes my inability to pick something and get to work any easier to swallow.

So, what do you do when you can't quite settle in and get anything done?  I'd love some ideas here!

Surprising Myself

When this happens, it's sort of like a double surprise.  Not only do I have a realization that surprises me, I'm always surprised that this can still happen. I'm pretty self-aware.  I journal and examine my emotions and actions and do all the things that help me be a calmer, happier, more balanced person.  And yet, I can still have sudden realizations about myself and about something I'm doing (or, in this case, not doing).  The subconscious is so intricate and just darned cool!

Over the past several weeks (really, several is mild--it's been about two months), I have been avoiding a project (an e-course I'm creating).  It's a project I really want to do.  It's a project I got a start on, and I was so excited about it.  And now I'm resisting it, ignoring it, allowing myself to forget that it even exists for long stretches of time.  Why?  I've lost faith in it.  I've lost faith that it's any good, that I can make it good, that people will want it.  I've become afraid and timid, and so I've stopped working on it.

Why did this happen?  Because I offered it to a very small focus group and didn't get any feedback.  Now, I know that it's mostly because all of the people in the group happened to have big, life changing events happen during the time we had scheduled for the group (out of five people, we had three new jobs and a new opportunity to teach at a major convention in the person's area of specialization).  So really, the focus group just had bad timing.  It probably has very little to do with the content of my course.  And yet I am still feeling as if doing this course is a waste of my time because it's no good.  No logic there.  That's the funny thing about emotions--they don't have to be logical, no matter how much you want them to be.

Now, add to my loss of faith the stress of knowing that I told the participants that I'd have the final version of the course PDFs to them as a gift by the end of this month, and it's a petri dish perfectly primed to grow the best, most stubborn and insidious procrastination around.

Okay.  Now it's all out there.  The project is woefully sidetracked and way off schedule.  Maybe I'll e-mail the group and let them know it will be later than I had anticipated.  Maybe I'll just get it done and send it when it's ready; I think they've probably forgotten that I was planning to send out the final product to them.  Maybe I'll just do it and see how it looks and then decide what to do with it next.  Maybe I'll find someone to talk to about it and ask if it's a worthwhile project--maybe I've committed myself to something that isn't so great.  I do know I can't just sit around doing nothing and fretting over it.  So now I've seen the problem, seen the "why" of it, and now I will move ahead.

Procrastination, Goals, and Forgetting

I have a procrastination problem.  I think I may have mentioned it before.  Twelve or a thousand times or so.  Lately, I am actively working on getting around this issue (I even wrote an article on it for the most recent issue of MuseCraft News**), and one of the things I've been doing is looking at exactly how I procrastinate.

I do a few things when I'm procrastinating.  First on the list is mindless, repetitive activities like solitaire or computer games.  My next most popular procrastination technique is surfing the internet--hopping from blog to blog, researching one thing and then the next that catches my eye, or just checking e-mail and Facebook over and over.  Really it's anything that will warp time a bit and make a few hours go by in what seems like only minutes.  But coupled with whatever I'm using to help me procrastinate is always one thing: forgetting.

The forgetting started in childhood.  I don't know if originally it was a story I made up to excuse myself from doing things I didn't want to do.  By the time I can remember saying, "I forgot" as an explanation for why something didn't get done, it was true.  I actually forget to do things that I am supposed to do or mean to do or even things that I want to do (and that last one is possibly the biggest problem of them all).  I can think of something, even intend to write it down so I will do it, and by the time I sit down at my desk, I've forgotten all about it. 

Is this a defense mechanism?  I don't know that, either.  I've come to believe that the whys of it all are not really that important.  The really important thing here is finding ways around my procrastination. Figuring out why all of this happens could take years.  Working out how to sidestep the problem shouldn't take nearly as long.

I started thinking of ways to use things I enjoy to help me overcome my procrastination habit.  What do I enjoy?  Office and school supplies--notebooks, pens, markers, folders.  Gadgets--computer programs, hand held electronics, etc.  Lists.

Next I worked on figuring out what helped during the times when I've been really productive and procrastinated less: NaNoWriMo; school; writing groups.  The major thing here is public deadlines--personal deadlines no one else knows about don't seem to be useful. 

This week I'm trying two things to help--I'll report on them after I've had a chance to work with them a bit.  I'm trying out the Annual Strategic Planner and Monthly Action Planner from Productive Flourishing coupled with a daily, short list written in my cool new bright green Day Runner LifeTracker (TM).

The second is Twitter.  No, really.  I know, it seems like it would help me procrastinate, right?  And it can do that.  But I think it can also help me break out of that rut. I'm using a few hashtags (#) to make some of my daily goals public.  Right now I'm using #writegoals and #amwriting; I may add others as I go along.  While not everything I want to do is writing related, a lot of it can be framed in a writing context (for example, "write tutorial for workshop).   For now I don't know any of the people participating in these groups, but as I get to know them, I think knowing people are seeing my goals and paying attention will help me get moving.

So that's where the anti-procrastination project is right now.  I hope I'll have some good results to report soon.  If you're wrestling with this, too, I'd love to hear what you're doing to tame it and how it's going for you.  Leave a comment or drop me a note.
 
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You're my obsession

Actually, I think I am my own obsession...

I obsess about things I should be doing. I procrastinate. I procrastinate the most about the things I actually want in my life. What kind of sense does that make? And then I procrastinate the things I should be doing/need to do, and then I obsess over them and worry and fret and let that keep me from doing the things I want to do. None of my behavior actually makes any sense. I have some understanding of the “whys” behind it, but it still doesn’t make any actual sense. Procrastination is an emotional response. Or, rather, it’s a response to emotional issues. It probably won’t make sense. That doesn’t mean it can’t be dealt with. But I think I may need to stop trying to logic myself out of it. I’ve been trying that for years, and it really hasn’t worked so well.

It really doesn’t help that I have this hang-up about how much time I have to do things. If I know I only have a small amount of time or I know after a certain amount of time I’m going to have to stop and do something else or I know that I’m likely to be interrupted, I can’t seem to let myself even start on my writing or even working on some sketching or any of the other things I actually really do want to be doing. I will waste time playing solitaire or spider solitaire on the computer or just randomly checking and rechecking e-mail or reading Live Journal (because delving into the blogs that are about things I’m really interested in might take too long—what??? What is my mind doing???). I will just waste time, and I know that I’m wasting time, just passing time, marking time, letting the time get away from me. And I know. I know what I’m doing, and yet I can’t seem to stop. I think my mind is broken. I worry that it might be. I worry that I have no focus and may never have it, and then I will never do anything important to me. I will just mark time, and what sort of epitaph will that make? “She was extraordinary at filling the time in her life.” Not quite what I was hoping for, but apparently what I’m aiming at.

Am I blocking myself from things that I want? Mostly. Sometimes at home I don’t do any of the things I want to do because I am distracted by the filthy house. I can’t get settled in to do what I want because there’s so much mess around me, but I can’t break out of my exhaustion to actually do anything about the house, either. So I do nothing.

I can’t even read through a full e-mail or newsletter or blog post when it’s something I’m really interested in. I find that I take breaks in the middle. I’m reading something, and suddenly I’m checking e-mail, playing a game, opening a new window. I have no idea what this means. I don’t fully even know what I’m doing writing all of this out. I read a quote earlier today from Deepak Chopra: “Whatever is stored in darkness becomes distorted.” Maybe I am trying to undistort myself?

So what do I need to do to break out of this? A schedule? Maybe.

I know that when I really think about writing and making a living outside this office, outside the place where someone else tells me what to do and gives me money for it, I worry. I worry that I won’t be able to make a living as a writer. I worry that if I pursue creativity coaching training I won’t be able to find any clients and I won’t be able to use that as part of my living. I worry that choosing the creativity coaching is the wrong avenue; I would also love to pursue a graduate degree in either English or creative writing and teach at the college level (I do really like teaching, and I love the atmosphere of a college/university). I worry that whichever of these I choose I won’t be able to pay the bills.

What does all of this mean? What do I do with it? I don’t know for sure. This month, I am participating in a group with Eric Maisel. It’s research for a new book he’s working on about productive obsessing. I love the concept of this. It makes a lot of sense to me to turn my unproductive worry obsessions into something I can use. It makes more sense than trying to wipe out the obsessive part of my personality. So, I’m testing it to see if it works for me.

Something I’m already finding out from this experiment—I enjoy being in an active group of creative people all talking about what we’re working on and how we intend to bring our plans and dreams to fruition. I enjoy it, and I get recharged and excited and enthused by it. Sadly, my work group in the Holly Lisle class is not very active at all. The in person writing group I formed last year also didn’t work out for me for other reasons—we all had different needs from the group, and it went in a direction that wasn’t right for me. But I could really use a small group of active, motivated people to keep in touch with and check in with regularly. This is something I will need to build in my life.

This is just a lot of rambling, isn’t it? And it’s a little uncomfortable having my weird, obsessive thoughts out there for anyone to look at. But if I’m going to get them under control, I think I have to look at them more openly and clearly and make a plan. So this is a start. And right now I have a direction to go in, a plan to follow, and for this month a group to check in with to help me keep going—just the things I need to turn those obsessions into fuel for my work. Which I am going to get going on as soon as this posts.

Merrily onward!

After a long absence

I wish I had great things to report, achievements, items checked off my "to do" list while I've been away from blogging. I don't. I crashed on NaNo, making just under 10,000 words. I have been in a state of anxious, depressed procrastination. Working my way out of it, I hope.

Today, this little blurb about O. Henry and procrastination arrived as part of my "Today in Literature" newsletter. It's from a book called O. Henry: The Legendary Life of William S. Porter

Henry was a drinker, a free spirit and a notorious procrastinator, but so famous that all was tolerated. He had promised a Christmas story to the New York Sunday World, for which they had set aside the center of the magazine section. When no story arrived, the newspaper's desperate illustrator, sent to Henry's apartment to beg for some hint of what to do, was told to draw a poorly furnished room: "...On the bed, a man and a girl are sitting side by side. They are talking about Christmas. The man has a watch fob in his hand. He is playing with it while he is thinking. The girl's principal feature is the long beautiful hair that is hanging down her back. That's all I can think of for now...." The illustrations were done and sent to press, but still no story. More begging messengers were sent to Henry's apartment, to be told that he was "empty as a brass drum." At the eleventh hour and facing disaster — a magazine with blank center pages, except for some mysterious drawings — the editor sent a final plea. Henry poured scotches for the reporter who delivered it, and for himself: "I've thought of an idea but I need a living model. I'm going to write a story about you and your wife.... I think that you two are the kind who would make sacrifices for each other. Now stay on the sofa and don't interrupt." Several drinks and three hours later, Henry finished "The Gift of the Magi," and the editor had it set in type by evening.

Breaking Free From the Panic Trap

Writing? What writing? That’s what this week feels like. The short story I’m working on, “Scissors Beat Paper,” isn’t coming together very well. I am slowly working on reworking the outline and plans for Blood of the Mist, but right now I’m feeling sluggish and (if I’m being honest) just a little resentful of having to practically start all over from scratch, so this isn’t exactly gliding along, either.
The worst part is that a lot of the difficulties I’m having right now are self-inflicted. I haven’t been sleeping well, so I’m feeling exhausted, and that’s making everything take much longer and require much more effort than it should, and yet I can’t seem to make myself go to bed earlier. I procrastinated a lot over the past two weeks, and now, with tomorrow’s writers’ meeting looming, my brain is frozen in deadline panic. And on top of all of that, I am letting myself succumb to the siren call of new story ideas which are flinging themselves at me fast and furious right now.
Some of the stumbling blocks are external, though. My office manager is on vacation this week, so I am doing two jobs at work all week. I am also getting ready to go to a big camping event this weekend followed immediately by flying to Chicago next Thursday for my cousin’s wedding. So my brain is swirling with plans and lists and “how am I going to get everything done?!”
I’ve found a way around this sort of brain-freezing terror, though. It works when I remember to do it. Actually, this post is part of the cure. I know a lot of artistic/creative types get into these bouts of hysteria—I think it comes with the territory. In the past, I could easily have let this build on itself and go on for months. But now, a bit over a week into it, I have recognized that I’m caught in the panic trap. Time for the antidote. Maybe it will help some of my readers, too, when they get caught up in the same snare.
First, recognize and acknowledge where you are. Out loud or in writing or both. I am procrastinating and panicking because I have a writers’ meeting tomorrow and have nothing written.
Next step—make a plan. Again, out loud or in writing or both. I will write a brief outline of the short story and do a short character sketch of Caylee and then jump back into the rewrite. For BotM, I will keep working with Dramatica Pro on the planning and outline and when I am done with that I will make a schedule for the actual rewrite.
Now, make a schedule for the various parts of your plan. It’s okay to just schedule the first part, as long as you actually schedule the next part when you finish the first and so on. I will do the outline and character sketch when I get home tonight. I will start the rewrite by making notes on the printout of the current draft, also tonight. I will do the actual rewrite tomorrow afternoon.
There. Now I can breathe again. Having a plan with small steps to follow and a schedule of exactly when I’m going to start and what I’m going to start with soothes my mind, lets me focus and move forward. And moving forward is all it takes to escape the fear fiends every time.

BIW week for February

Writing? Who’s writing? Oh yeah, me. I am not actually writing. Unless you count this as writing. I am supposed to be writing. I mean to be writing. I am not writing. Not right now. I will be soon.

My goal for this month is 15 pages. I cut last month’s goal in half. I figure 15 pages is easy in a week, right? Not if I’m not writing, though. I am having such a hard time settling in, and I don’t know why. Maybe because I am somewhat nearing the end, and I’m just not sure exactly how to bring it together. And then I’m not sure about how to go about fixing the story and making it actually good. Sigh…

Meanwhile, I have started working with Julia Cameron’s new book, The Writing Diet. It’s a pretty good idea, really. I am writing for that—I have been writing notes about my food and my desire to eat all afternoon. Maybe that’s why I’m not working on story? No. It’s not. I’m not working on story because my mind is unsettled. I need to work on that. I think I will make a plan right here and now. I am going to read my writing book until it is time to go home. At home, I will make dinner. I will eat dinner. At 8 p.m., I will sit down and write. Just for half an hour. That’s not so bad at all, and I can do that. I’ve done it dozens, maybe hundreds of times. And I’m going to do it today, too.

Slogging along

My brain is frozen. I'm in a stupor. I want to play games and read and watch tv and sleep. I do not want to write right now. But I have word count that needs adding to. I have only written about 800 words today. I need more words. I don't want to write them. But if I don't write more today I'll be even further behind, and my plans for catching up have been going so well this week. And I must remind myself that tomorrow is our anniversary, so I will only get in whatever writing time is available to me at work. By the time we get home from having dinner out, it will be late, and I know I will be too tired to string any comprehensible sentences together. So I need to write. Right now. Why am I not writing? See the beginning of this post...Maybe if I have some dinner (it is nearly ready after all) and then take a shower I will feel like writing. Of course, then it will be nine o'clock. But I should still be alert enough, especially after a shower, to get in more words. But I need a lot more words to make my 2200 today. Maybe today I will just do the regular daily total of 1667. In that case, I'm already half-way there. Maybe I should stop making excuses and pull my notebook out and write.

And so it begins

NaNo started out with a whimper for me this year. As I mentioned the other day, I didn’t get as much planning done beforehand as I was hoping for, so I really didn’t feel ready today. And I was trying to do a bit of a different sort of planning, too. Today I decided that I wasn’t sure if that was working out. I was thinking it might have even been making things more difficult for me. Trying out a new planning routine when I didn’t really have much planning time available was probably not the greatest choice. So this morning/early afternoon I filled in an Aristotelian story incline, got my basic plot points in place, and I’m feeling a little better about things.

I’m going to spend the rest of my afternoon here at work fiddling around with names and a few other planning details, and tonight when I get home I’m going to sit down with the laptop, sign into the forums, and do some word wars to get my word count for today. Or to at least get some word count for today.

Big sigh of relief over here. I am feeling pretty good now; I think I will win again this year. I’ve done a lot of work today, so I’m starting to feel ready to dive in. Of course, if I had kept up with regular writing sessions and writing practices through the year, I wouldn’t have gotten rusty at all, now would I? Ah well…At least I have something ready to go. And this really just proves what I’ve known about myself for ages—I really work best with some sort of external deadline. I just don’t know exactly how to make that work in my favor while I am pursuing a writing career…But that’s for figuring out in a different month.