Sunday evening, 7pm and I’ve not written my weekly blog post. I spent the weekend procrastinating or delaying it.
Procrastination mode
The symptoms: I was telling myself I had to write it. But my attention was kept by other activities: drawing, reading, playing games.
And my brain had very good excuses: you need to relax, you must rest. You have a stressful context right now. If you don’t do it, it will not be a big deal.
Delaying mode
It’s fiiiiiine. We are Saturday morning, I have plenty of things scheduled already, I’ll do it tomorrow.
Sunday morning: it’s fine, I still have plenty of time. And I don’t know exactly which topic to choose. I have plenty of ideas.
Sunday evening: it’s fine. I’ll write it tomorrow and I’ll change the post date to Sunday evening.
How did I overcome this?
If you are able to read this post, it means I still managed to write it down. And I did not cheat on the date and time.
So how did I do it?
First, I observed my thoughts and feelings. My brain wanted to keep me safe and comfortable over the weekend.
Which is OK. But then I considered my result: no article written. So, obviously this thinking is not helping me to move forward.
Next step: how to motivate myself then?
I redirected my thoughts to my purpose: how am I going to positively impact people if I don’t write anything or never show up?
Even if I impact only one person, this is already better than none. This is a long term investment of my time.
And I also consider this time as a commitment with myself. If I don’t write this weekly post, I will not be able to trust myself anymore on my ability to overcome this kind of obstacles (that I call thought errors). And I just can’t accept that from myself. This is about my self-esteem and reputation.
So now, my post is written and I find it is a great example of how to overcome procrastination. I’ll keep this one as a reminder that, no matter what, I’ll write this weekly post, as long as this serve my purpose.
