The Eternal Procrastinator: Prioritising Writing

As you can see I spend a lot of time on Snapchat. Too much time. I even spend a considerable amount of time on their just looking at myself in the filters and not actually taking the pictures. At least twice a day, that’s what I’ll cop to anyway. I go on just to see what the current filters are. I am so pathetic!

Procrastinating to me is second nature, I think I’ve mentioned it before either somewhere on this blog but definitely on Woeful To FroFull (shameless plug!) that it is literally in my bones. I’ve gotten better over the years but it’s still something that holds me back. I am a list maker, a note taker, an action faker. I now send emails to myself for things I should do later and some of the them are things I could do in that moment but can’t be bothered for whatever reason.

I’d never realised that writing a blog would add to this. The point of starting the blog(s) was to push myself to write regularly. My other blog publishes something new roughly every 5 days and this blog is once a week. There’s no particular thinking behind this schedule other than I thought after years of not writing as much as I wanted, I wouldn’t be stretching myself too much. I overestimated that one. I feel this stress to get things done, like I have tight deadlines and the world will cease spinning if a blog post is not uploaded on the 5th of the month.

I try to give myself some breathing room by blogging in advance and scheduling posts with a few weeks spare. That works especially well with this blog as I could write for 15 minutes every night for a week and that’s 7 weeks of content. The blogging rules I have read during extensive hours of procrastinating research include posting as much as possible, even up to 3 times a day. I can tell you now, that is not happening. There is not enough time in a day for me to procrastinate away for that.

Turns out though that writing this blog is a form of procrastinating, who knew? It fulfils the goal of writing more and I’m loving every minute of it under my self-induced stress from my own arbitrary deadlines, I really am. But my ultimate goal is to write a book. I know, join the queue of wannabe novelists trying to make it. I have a million story ideas that I start and there is one in my head at the minute that I literally cannot get rid of. It’s happened before over the years and the passion or motivation for the story usually wanes and ultimately disappears.

But I’ve reached a point in my life where I can’t keep putting things off. I just can’t. It’s something I want to achieve before I die and if I die prematurely, that it is something that I was well on my way to completing. I try now to look at it like the diet I should have which is to eat little but often. I try to write down my ideas when I get them, not wait until later when I am near a notepad or have access to my Word documents, because the truth of that is by the time I get to the notepad, I’ve forgotten the idea or at least the details that made it worthy to be added to my story. I don’t do that anymore or I do it less and I have noticed that the story I’m creating feels to me like it is of a higher quality than previous work because the ideas are being captured at the moment of inspiration when the spark is initially there.

I can say that one of the things that is fuelling my procrastination is a worry that as much enthusiasm and passion I have for my writing is that it might not actually be good. Now I’m not talking about my Timed Writing or Writing Prompt exercises that I post on here. Those are partially developed ideas that are created under time pressure, they are not heavily edited, if at all, and are more of a place to just put ideas down.  I’m worried if I take on the role of author, writer of books, novelist that what I write has to be remarkable.  And if it is not, I have failed and it has failed publicly, or public enough for my “following” or more accurately, the lucky few who stumble upon ths blog from time to time, to see. I think that’s a valid reason to procrastinate – fear of being crap.

Week by week I feel that I am getting more successful at making time to write hopefully without neglecting any of my other life duties. You’d have to ask my husband about that, hopefully, he would just say I’m as lazy as I was before!

I know now, really know, that if I want this I will prioritise my writing accordingly. It obviously will not come above my family or my job (even though I wish it could), even laundry but if it’s what I want, what my sould needs, I could let go of Vanderpump Rules or Botched to make time. I suppose…

xx woeful writes xx