Thursday, April 14, 2011

Procrastination!!

I'm guessing that everybody knows this feeling:

All right! I have some time to write today. Time to sit down and open that Word Document. Okay. Here we go. OH HELLO FACEBOOK HOW ARE YOU?

Or perhaps this one?

I want to write but the cursor is mocking me. I should just ignore it and type... OR MAYBE I SHOULD MAKE TEA CHECK MY EMAIL SIX TIMES WATCH SOME YOUTUBE VIDEOS AND LOOK AT TWITTER AND ABSOLUTE WRITE AND WIKIPEDIA JUST FOR GOOD MEASURE.

It happens to the best of us. And some of us *raises hand* are experts at procrastinating.

Fortunately I have found a method of procrastination that works fairly well for me. Multitasking.

Allow me to explain. When I'm going to write (or do homework: this method works astonishingly well for homework as well), I sit myself down and I write. This could be a couple of sentences or a couple of paragraphs depending upon how well the writing groove is going that day. And then after I write those couple of sentences, I allow myself to check Facebook or Absolute Write or YouTube. And then I go back and write a little bit more, or read another ten pages of my history book. Then, back to Facebook.

I'd like to think that I'm allowing my brain to just relax for a minute while I'm switching back and forth between activities, but really, all I'm probably doing is keeping it busy with the things I want to keep it busy with - ie writing and selected Internet wanderings - rather than having it ramble off on its own while I'm staring at a blank page or trying to read the sentence about Robespierre I've been trying to parse for ten minutes.

Another thing I've found that works well for doing this is conversations on AIM - yes, I know I'm from the stone age, hush you. I can't carry on multiple conversations and write at the same time (sorry), but over the summer, I'd talk to my one friend just about every night and be writing away at the same time. Worked out fairly well, I think (thanks Anna).

What do you guys do to combat the procrastination monster? Do you shut off your internet while you write, or do you train the monster so that it works for you?

1 comment:

  1. I'm struggling with this too. I find that method of writing for a bit, then letting the brain shake itself loose and browse Facebook and whatnot for a bit, works for me as well.

    There's something called 'The Pomodoro Technique' which has a similar idea going on, it's 25 minutes of working then 5 minutes of internet browsing before resuming the working. I have a little timer for it on Chrome (Firefox has an add-on for it too, and probably Opera), but I'm bad at remembering to turn it on...

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