Procrastination

I have taken all the personality tests possible.

I can be the most goal directed, driven person you will ever come across. And if you have come across me, you know that is actually an understatement.

So this may come as a bit of a surprise.

I procrastinate. And I am good at it (or bad at it, not sure which way that might go).

And my procrastination seems to lurk in only one area. My writing. And it doesn't matter what form that writing takes. Blog posts. Book authoring. Research preparation. Procrastination! I will pick up almost ANY other tasks, even dreaded, hated, disgusting tasks, before I will sit down to write. I will actually make up work or volunteer for something that I have no business volunteering for, just to procrastinate.

When I wrote for the publishing house, we would gather in Nashville for a writers workshop. Everyone that was working on content would get together and brainstorm over a couple of quarters worth of material, flesh out ideas, essentially “geek-out” on Bible stories for three days, and then head home with our assignments. You would have 13 -14 weeks to prepare your quarter's worth of material, and a quarters worth of material was 13-14 weeks long. Simple math, do a weeks worth of material in a week and have submitted in plenty of time. Right? No! Regardless of how diligent I was, nothing was written in advance of one week prior to deadline. I can tell you that I can churn out one weeks worth of material in 8 hours. I found this disturbing, until I confided in a writer colleague, and she exclaimed that she always put it off until the week prior to the deadline. Then she would lock herself in her office and her husband would throw food into her. Her kids were told under no circumstances to disturb her. Wow.

I share this with you, as a confession. When there are no new posts on the blog, it is because I have been busy procrastinating. Actually that is not 100% accurate. I have been working on a research project that I have to present next week, which I have been procrastinating with about 8 weeks. And as you read this, I am writing this blog post while procrastinating about completing the research project. So this is productivity in lieu of the product that I need to be producing.

Oh it is all so very complicated. The procrastination does allow me to simmer my ideas, hopefully until they are just right. Which is a very lame rationalization. It does create a level of stress that demands response, and I can proudly (shamefully) say that I am still able to pull an all nighter. But it would seem to me to be so much less complicated to follow the beautifully crafted schedule that I create (while procrastinating) to complete writing projects in a timely manner.

This is a tight place, but I am not sure how thin it is