How to Make the Most of Procrastination
This is a guest post by A. Victoria Mixon.
They say you can never go home again. But I beg to differ. You just have to get serious about procrastination.
Now, you know—and I know—that your deadline today is the one deadline you’re simply not going to meet. That’s why you’re over here reading up on procrastination, isn’t it? Go ahead and admit it. Stretch out on the floor and relax. Stop fighting your fate.
Instead, let’s talk a little about how you’re going to arrange the furniture in your old room when you move back in with your parents.
Wow, that was a long time ago when you lived with them, wasn’t it? Chores, siblings, homework, curfew. That bedroom closet probably still has a pair of moonboots and a year’s supply of Ice Pink lipgloss in it. Not that you’re going to look.
And I bet your parents are a lot easier to live with now that all three of you are adults—I know mine were, when I broke my arm in my mid-twenties and had to move back home while I went through multiple surgeries. My dad kept the car full of gas. My mother let me stay out all night. She even did my laundry! Of course, I only had the use of one hand, and I wound up incapacitated when I had to have bone taken out of my hips. But my siblings were gone—I had the TV remote all to myself.
It’s true my mother had converted my old room into a studio for her loom, and she developed an alarming tendency to come through the door first thing in the morning while I still had my head under the pillow. And my dad only let me have the remote while he was at work during the week—evenings and weekends I watched a whole lot of football and woodworking documentaries, complete with commentary from the peanut gallery. It’s a good thing I’m kind of interested in woodworking. The football sucked bad.
It’s also true my siblings still had free run of the house, and they showed up rather more frequently than absolutely necessary, now with a whole entourage of spouses and children and career updates that made me look just a teeny little bit like a freeloading loser. I put up with a lot of lame jokes from my brothers-in-law. (But I loved seeing the little children every day!)
Not really so terrible. . .and I’ll tell you the one thing that made it totally worthwhile: I never had to work. No queries, no rejections, no calendars, no research, no elusive interviewees, no conflicting data, no editors changing their minds in mid-stream, no billing, no repeat-billing, no arguing over billing. No deadlines. No writer’s block.
I woke up every single morning with the whole sweet, golden day to myself.
People, wallow in your proclivity for procrastination. You’re probably much better at it than I was. Roll around in it and get it all over yourself. Stare at the ceiling and calculate on your fingers how much money you could make if you only worked some minimum number of hours a week (ten? five? two?). Derive that from a multiplication of the number of hours you’ve actually worked today. Decide what motels you’ll spend that money on whenever your squeeze comes to visit your parents’ house and you have to meet clandestinely because your father can’t take the thought of anyone with you in your childhood bed.
Then calculate how much you’d make if you worked full-time and how big a place you could afford in order to escape your parents. (About as big as where you live now?) Tally up how many services like electricity and phone and gas you might be able to indulge in. Pizza! Movies! A hot, swanky night on the town on your birthday!
Then calculate what kind of moolah you could rake in if you worked even longer hours. What if you trained yourself to sleep only four hours a night? And learned how to dress properly in public? And pitched an idea to that place that pays really well, the one looking for articles on the same subject as that piece you did just last week? And got accepted by all the top venues simultaneously—even the ones you haven’t pitched to yet?
Huh. That’s a lot! Lightbulb.
Maybe I should let my parents know I might be moving out pretty soon. . .
•••••
A. Victoria Mixon is a professional writer and independent editor with over thirty years’ experience in both fiction and nonfiction. She is the coauthor of Children and the Internet: A Zen Guide for Parents and Educators and author of The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual. She can be reached through her blog, her Editing Services, and Twitter.
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Feb 17, 2011 Advice, Motivation, Observations, productivity
I read the first page of this article and liked the premise, but it seemed like work to read the rest. So, I did the dishes (but not all of them), and then took a walk. I then read the second paragraph in between feeding the dog. I came back to the article a bit later after watching Modern Family then took in an episode of Californication before finishing it. Now my day is shot–thx!
Richard, I was going to stay on top of responding to comments on this blog post, but I’m afraid I got distracted. . .
This has nothing to do with procrastination, but I can’t resist commenting.
I really enjoyed your guest-post until I reached the “over thirty years’ experience” in your bio. There was a freshness (“nata,” my Spanish teachers used to call it) to your copy that smacked of far less experience, and I was happier not knowing it.
Good work.
And this is hilarious. You liked me better when you thought I was a newbie? Then you’d have clutched your chest & keeled over if you’d been at my local Writers Club when I spoke last week, where the President introducing me read my bio off the back of my book out loud for the first time and realized it says I’ve been doing this work for “a bazillion years.”
[...] In keeping with Formichelli Week, I’ve got a post up today on Linda’s site, The Renegade Writer Blog. [...]
I used to have a button on my blog that was called ‘Are you supposed to be doing something more productive and serious than reading blog posts? Confess here’. Quite a few confessions were dropped in the box.
Too funny! And that reminds me of this great website by Merlin Mann: http://www.merlinmann.com/rightnow/. I used to keep it up on my browser…I need to start doing that again.
Ewww!
Aren’t we ALL supposed to be doing something more productive & serious? This writing stuff we do because we love writing, not because we’re grown-ups.
Instead of procrastinating, wouldn’t it be simpler to just slow down the rest of the world?
Tried it. The world fought back.
Err…This reminds me I got work to do. Been messing around all day. Someone has to pay these bills…lol
It’s true—my dad retired, and my mother keeps blowing her cash on walking trips in Wales. We’re running way short on grocery money around here these days.