I may look hyper productive to you
But I take great pains to project that look to the world.
I think the implication of this picture is that I stress-eat. My glasses.
I do work hard and do a lot of things, don't get me wrong, but it's not like I'm constantly work-work-working like a windup person.
In fact, recently I've been struggling a bit with procrastination.
At time of writing, actually, I feel like I've gotten back into a groove, but when I decided to write about this topic, I was deep in the thick of what seemed like endless procrastinating.
And it's a really frustrating feeling for me in particular because the stuff I've been procrastinating on is the stuff I say I enjoy doing and I want to turn into a creative career. My writing is what I'm talking about.
I've been writing some plays on my laptop and I think we all know the problems with writing on a computer. Namely that the internet is... it's right there! YouTube, it's... it's right there! The dumb Let's Plays I like... they're three clicks away! Oh, or I could open Solitare and just listen to all of these podcasts, god I love podcasts!
A thousand people have spoken eloquently on procrastination. There's a lot of clever wording and such around the topic. I'm not going to talk about procrastination itself, per se, but what I think has been a cause for me recently.
You see, sometimes writing is hard. Sometimes, writing isn't a lot of fun. In fact, part of the reason I dumped the novel recently was because it was remarkably unfun 95% of the time. A lot of writing, no matter how much one is in love with he subject matter, inevitably turns into a slog, doubly so if it's a novel.
But! After a writing session after I just knuckle down and do the stupid shit I said I'd do, whether it be a word or page goal, I feel so freaking EUPHORIC when it's done!*
So what it sounds like to me is, the problem is mostly one of willpower. Of getting over myself and just committing that, yeah, these may not be the most blazingly brilliant words I've ever written, but it's important I get something out and then I can fix it later. Accepting that it'll be crap at first is a surprisingly good way to get started.
But its still an issue of willpower. "Oh geez, ten pages of a script sounds like an awful lot."
Even more insidious is when I start, but then stop to take a break (which is actually good for productivity sometimes) but then I never go off of the break. I try and go back to the writing, but for some reason, even though I've already started it, going back to it is even more excrutiating than before. Sometimes I need to go through the whole "breathe and let the shit come out and let it be shit" talk again when I come off of break.
It's worrying that this happens to me, but I think it's natural. People tend to take the path of least resistence. Knuclking down to write for an hour? That's a lot of damn resistence.
Willpower is a muscle. Work it work it work it and eventually, one can ignore the youtube icon at the top of their browser and just let it flow.
*Well, I didn't with the iced novel. That's why I iced it. Wasn't getting that damn REWARD DOPAMINE.