the plan

a few days ago I caught up with my friend Kelly from college; she had a baby a few months ago and I've been so bad at keeping in touch with her lately. She lives kind of far away, in exotic Deluxbury, and it's tough for us to see each other since she had the baby (which doesn't explain why I can't seem to find time to talk to her on the phone, but anyways...)

Sometimes I feel like we have less in common since she's "settled down," she's got lots of adult things to deal with while my life is unfettered by marriage, homeowning, baby-raising, etc. Besides the occasional pang of guilt for being incredibly irresponsible and short-sighted most of the time, I'm pretty much happy with that - I just really really wish I could procrastinate less.

I was complaining to Kelly about my time-wasting habit, which used to be something we had in common. In college we both wound up with majors that required us to produce mass quantities of writing every week, which is pretty much kryptonite to severe procrastinators. The two of us seemed to constantly be one-upping each other in that department: if one of us said "I've got a 30-page paper to write, I haven't even started it, and it's already two days late," the other would come back with somthing like "yeah, well I've got a 40-page paper to write, I haven't even started it or done the reading, it's already three days late, and I haven't slept in 72 hours." And unfortunately, it would be true. We were consistently behind, asking for extensions after papers were already late, never able to catch up. We never did our reading and we were always stressed out, pulling all-nighters and writing exclusively in long, cracked-out jags. When we graduated, and it was a miracle that we did, I was pretty sure I never wanted to write another word.

Proving that the gods are indeed crazy, Kelly and I both wound up writing for a living, more or less. The other day on the phone when we started to commiserate about the evil that is The Deadline, I told Kelly how hopeless I felt about my whole thesis problem, how I was pretty sure I'd never figure out how to "get work done" like normal people. Then she dropped a bomb on me, telling me that she had quit procrastinating and had the solution. I was shocked to hear that my former partner in crimes of laziness had quit - it was like a knife to my heart to feel like I was now officially the only one with this, um, malaise?

Apparently Kelly's epiphany came when a coworker told her something very simple like "worry today doesn't solve work tomorrow," which somehow snapped her out of her decade-long procrastination funk. She didn't really elaborate on her exact strategy for quitting, but the fact that she did it, if only for a week so far, gave me a lot of hope for my own situation. More importantly, it made me realize that just how much the 'worrying' can hold me hostage - the dread of the blank page, the paralyzing fear of never finishing...

When I got off the phone with Kelly I felt ready to get all serious about work...and then I checked my email. Out of, say, twenty emails, five were spam and fifteen were completely pointless. Emails from people I talk to or see almost every day, useless communications that someone decided to CC me on, ridiculous forwards about guardian angels. Normally I would read each of these emails and reply to the majority of them, even though it would actually be faster to get in the car, drive to school or wherever, see these people in person, have a five-minute conversation and be done with it. So I decided to delete all of my non-essential emails, and it was so f-ing liberating. I can't believe it never occurred to me before, how much of my time I waste emailing, how much of other people's time I waste, and how much they waste my time.

I had a similar revelation a few weeks ago regarding my cell phone, and pretty much stopped picking up the phone altogether unless I knew exactly why the person was calling and really wanted to talk to them. That was really liberating too, but poorly executed. A normal person not picking up the phone is probably screening their calls and listening to the voicemails later on. Once I accumulated four or five messages, however, it just seemed too daunting to even listen to them, so I didn't...for like two weeks. As it turns out I missed out on some pretty important stuff, not to mention the fact that everyone started to hate me. People kept asking if I was avoiding them, and I was a little embarassed - but you can't just tell someone they're not worth your time, even if it's totally true. I'm addicted to human interaction in all its forms, but it's something I just have to lay off if I'm ever going to graduate.

Anyhow, the point of all of this is that I am going to take advantage of all these lessons I've learned recently and I'm putting them together in a new plan to quit procrastinating. This is a two-pronged approach, combining two strategies I've tried before to no avail: getting over the fear and living under a rock. I know from many past experiences that neither of these works for me on its own, but I'm hoping that together they'll create some kind of wondrously fruitful chemical reaction in my brain. So this week, my mantra is "over fear, under rock," and I plan to repeat it ad nauseum whenever I feel the urge to procrastinate.

On that note, I've been writing this post for a while now and I'm sure I could find a better use of my time. I'm not saying I will, but I could... I'll probably just go to sleep, I'm exhausted from a long day of green cleaning and talking to people, two things I'm not allowing myself to do for the next four days. I'm off to the little Walden Pond that exists only in my mind, where I plan to be very hermit-like, very self-absorbed, and very productive this week. So if you call me and I don't pick up the phone, rest assured, it's not you, it's me.