So I spent about half of yesterday in a prolonged flinch reflex. Heh…that would be another way of saying “diddled away hour after hour after in raw procrastination.”
There was this little job I needed to do for the current client. The previous day, somehow I’d managed to convince myself that this was going to be another of the exercises in tedium that blight my career. And I think I’m developing an allergy to tedium.
Now, if I’d scheduled a couple of hours right after I got back from the (somewhat abortive) meeting, along about 9:00 or 9:30, to perform said spate of tedium, then by lunch it would’ve been done and I could’ve filled the entire afternoon with the things I wanted to do, like writing chapter 4 of the next book and organizing the cookbook and walking the dog in the park and generally dorking around.
But nooooooo…. No, not a chance.
Wrote a blog post instead.
Moving on: lunch. Grilled mahi-mahi, avocado salad. Dates stuffed with walnuts. Tangerines. Read the paper. Read an article in the New York Times.
Very nice. Killed another slab of time.
Next: dream up the backstory for a character who’s proving singularly difficult to turn into a live human being. Or a representation thereof.
That wasn’t especially productive. Well, maybe, on a subliminal level. But not so much that, say, a credible dialogue could be gagged out.
Getting fat: still haven’t dropped the two pounds picked up after the greasy, salty breakfast at iHop. Go for walk: 1.75 miles.
Welp, now it’s gettin’ along toward three o’oclock in the afternoon. Huh. Time to start working. I guess.
The stupid project only took about an hour and 45 minutes. Soooo….
If I’d prioritized the paying work (in some sort of serious way) and done it in the morning, $105 would’ve been in the bank (or good as) by lunchtime. With the wildly over-anticipated tedium out of the way, I would’ve felt a lot less stressed when I sat down to novelize…and maybe that character would’ve come to life.
Moral of the story? Paying work first. Then playing work.
😉
This has always been one of my challenges. I’ve often found myself “working” all day long, but end up with nothing that actually puts a dollar in the bank. I’m working hard to change that this year, though, and using some new techniques and tools to stay on task.
Yes! That is the plague of my life! I can’t even COUNT the number of evenings when I exulted, about to climb into the sack, “Omigawd! I got sooo much wonderful work done” and then thought…”Wait, what? There’s not a single billable minute here.”
So common to default to what we like to do, or what’s easier. I had the best intentions this morning of writing that post on hot chili peppers *first*, and here I am reading up on FaM.
heh heh heh heh… First things first! 😉
Me, too, also. It can be way too easy to get distracted writing something for my own site, contributing something quick to another site or thinking about articles not due for another two weeks — and sorta/kinda forget about the stuff that’s due much sooner.
Or, since I work from home like you, to get distracted by chores or cooking projects or exercise. And three times in the past month I pinch-hit child care for my niece — fun, but not exactly conducive to getting much work done. Sigh.
It’s said that procrastination is a signal characteristic of the writer.
As a matter of fact, I even held forth on that subject in my book, The Essential Feature, published some time back thru’ Columbia. My theory is that procrastination is itself a constructive and creative activity…there’s a point where you need to process what you’ve learned, what you want to say, and how you intend to say it. To a large extent that processing goes on at a subconscious level. It’s like looking at a faint star and seeing it more clearly when you’re not staring directly at it. Just as peripheral vision is more sensitive to faint inchoate images, there’s a kind of intellectual peripheral vision that you engage by…well, by disengaging.