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Do you make a commitment to write, and then fail to live up to it? Here are five ways to stop procrastinating….
A few weeks ago, my husband made a date for us. He agreed that we’d both meet some friends at a nearby mountain, snowshoe into a lodge, eat dinner there and listen to some bluegrass music. At first, it sounded like fun! But as departure time approached, I grew leery.
The friends are perfectly nice, but I don’t know them terribly well. It was really cold out and I’m easily chilled. My back hurt and wouldn’t all that snowshoeing make it worse? Blah, blah and blah.
I went only because I’d promised. I was even grumpy on the snowshoe in to the lodge, although both the weather and the snow were perfect. In fact, it took me until we started dancing (in hiking boots!) to have a really good time. On the snowshoe home, I was raving about what a spectacular evening we’d enjoyed.
Funny how things change in retrospect, isn’t it?
I find the same feeling of dread frequently plagues writers before we write. We delay and procrastinate, finding a zillion other things to do, but when (if?) we finally sit down to do it, writing is not nearly as awful as we’d imagined it to be.
If you have a hard time getting yourself to show up for your own writing, here are five tips:
1) Know that “discipline” is an illusion. Yes, there are people who write every day — just as there are people who exercise every day. But this has little to do with “discipline” and more to do with motivation. The people who do any task regularly do it because they have a darn good reason. Find your motivation for writing and remind yourself of it constantly, perhaps with a picture of whatever motivates you propped on your desk or taped to your computer.
2) Be sure to reward yourself for meeting your writing goals. Don’t just use the stick — remember the power of the carrot (or the latte, or the 20 minutes on Facebook). And make those rewards frequent. If you’re writing every day, you need at least one reward a week, maybe more than that.
3) Start small. Big tasks are always overwhelming and it’s easy to postpone them. So, if you want to write every day (which is a great idea, by the way) then start with a time that’s a small fraction of what you eventually intend to achieve. It’s better to do a little bit of something every day than a whole lot of something once a week — even if you contribute exactly the same total number of minutes.
4) Monitor how you’re speaking to yourself while writing and shut down the negative comments. Yes, we all talk to ourselves. And writers are among the harshest self-critics I know. Don’t allow yourself to get away with that! When your inner voice tells you your writing is boring, tell it that you’ll deal with that concern later, when you’re editing.
5) Make a precise commitment. Don’t vow to “become a better writer.” (That’s way too vague.) Instead commit to writing for x number of minutes per day or producing x number of words per day. Furthermore, make this commitment public, perhaps by finding a writing buddy with whom you can share your goals. (I’ve written this newsletter every week for five years now only because I promised you I would. Without that promise, I would certainly have slacked off ages ago.)
As Woody Allen says, eighty percent of success is showing up. Be sure not to miss your own date with your writing.
