Kicking procrastination in the butt
Procrastination is nothing new. But the acceleration of limitless opportunity for distraction offered by the digital world is unprecedented. There is an undercurrent of urgency to life today, both at work and home, that leaves us feeling drained – and perpetually short of the finish line. We’ve lost the race before it started, so why not just numb out to YouTube?
Procrastination fascination
My preoccupation with procrastination was triggered this week because I am slow to post. It started with the dreaded blank page and blinking cursor. Then a pause to click and discover The Top 10 Workout Songs for March. Four articles, two videos and seven listicles later, it’s back to blank page and blinking cursor. Pause to click and watch the Auntie Fee video that popped up on my Facebook feed. Back to blank page and blinking cursor. Pause to fall down the next rabbit hole of online entertainment, enlightenment, fascination or horror.
And so it goes… Then, just in case those online distractions weren’t enough, I could also find a classic procrastination line-up, such as:
- Exhaustion after an intense period on the Day Job
- A busy weekend planning hubby’s birthday celebrations, including a six-hour round trip drive to his parents’ for lunch on Saturday, followed by hosting a dinner party at home the following evening
- The stolen iPad keyboard charger and headphones during a recent business trip (so that I must now use a journal to scribble notes and then wait until sitting in front of my desktop to type…heaven forbid!)
- Appointments to schedule, bills to pay, documents to file…etc., etc.
But if we strip away all of these excuses for a moment, we get to the real story: I was slow to post because of the fear monsters. You know, those ever-so-helpful self-limiting voices in one’s head that offer a non-stop stream of supportive encouragement whenever we endeavor to break outside the usual routine. In my case, they include such gems as: “What are you going to write about now?”, “What if the next post sucks…it will just prove this project is a total waste of time”, “Get serious…you have more important priorities to manage”.
How busy are you, really?
The king of all narratives, however, has got to be the ‘not good enough’ story. It struck me that I had fallen into this trap once again after stumbling upon a Washington Post article, featuring an interview with Brené Brown, during my online procrastinatory wanderings. (Proving that at least some good can come of digital distraction.)
In case you’ve been living on another planet, Brené is the infamous researcher storyteller whose TED Talk on “The Power of Vulnerability” gets at the core of what inhibits us in our relationships, pursuits, and life in general.
Bookmark it and bookmark it again…:
Brené’s words of wisdom, shared with humour and compassion, were my daily medicine last year during a particularly challenging period. (Yes, I am proud to say that I have personally contributed at least 30 of the 3 million+ views of this video on YouTube).
In the Washington Post piece, Brené talks about vulnerability within the context of the work sphere and how we use ‘crazy-busy’ as a type of armour to numb and protect ourselves from vulnerability:
What a lot of us do is that we stay so busy, and so out in front of our life, that the truth of how we’re feeling and what we really need can’t catch up with us.
In truth, what we’re doing is procrastinating on a whole new scale. In this information age, the temptation is amplified. On the one hand, many people today race to stay ahead of an always-on work culture. Meanwhile, in our limited down time we subject ourselves to an endless stream of curated lifestyle templates, whether consciously or not.
This collection of images, articles and tips promise we can detoxify, fast, crunch, massage and masterfully Photoshop our way to perfection. All of this Authentic Living is a full-time job in itself; an additional burden to the well-documented pressures of the modern day work world. It’s no wonder we seek solace in distraction.
‘I want to break free’
What can we do to get off the back-burner and into action? The first step is to get off the proverbial couch! This may seem obvious to all of those ENTJ Myers-Brigg’s types out there, but for those of us with a tendency to think, plan or map our way to action, getting out of your head and rolling up your sleeves to dive in to doing is a powerful trigger.
Whether it’s having an honest discussion with a co-worker that isn’t cooperating, baking a birthday cake for a loved one, or completing a workout video that’s been gathering dust, make this week about getting it done. No self-imposed limits, no second-guessing (this is a tough one…), no re-playing all of the Should Have, Could Have, Would Have’s. Just get it done.
The next step is to accept that it doesn’t have to be perfect. Perfectionism is not about getting it just right for the sake of a better world. There is no benefit to funnelling our energy into the endless pursuit of an unachievable ideal — usually perpetuated in the name of selling products and services, no less. The truth is that perfectionism is about our own fear of criticism and failure. And it’s paralyzing.
Rather than hide behind the armour of crazy-busy this week, I am arming myself with Brené’s gentle reminder:
Perfectionism is about what people will think. And you do not see effective leaders in corporations sitting on an email for three hours to make sure it’s worded just perfectly. You don’t. They have work to get done.
By the way, my hubby’s birthday cake didn’t look like the one in the Martha cookbook. But he loved it anyway. And it was much better done than perfect or, worse, not done at all because I couldn’t quite get the tiers to line up properly or find the right shade of sprinkles to match the napkins.
