Battling the Procrastination Paradox

I am embarrassed to admit that it has been over three months since I’ve posted here. When I started this blog in 2005, my goal was to post often. Perhaps as frequently as once per week. Writing is relaxing, I have a lot that I would like to say, and I enjoy receiving feedback from strangers online. So why have I only posted 31 articles in 41 months?

One of my most frustrating problems in life is that I too often let myself get sucked into vicious cycles of procrastination. I do my best to not fall behind with things, because once I do, a downward spiral begins with a gravitational force so strong that not even Hawking radiation could escape. (Seriously, CERN could save themselves a lot of time and money by abandoning the LHC and studying my procrastination instead!)

For example, if I’m supposed to phone a friend on a Monday but I forget to call, then calling them on Tuesday would be the next best thing. However, phoning them on Tuesday would involve having to admit to myself that I forgot to call on Monday and that makes me feel rotten. Calling them on Wednesday would be good, but that’s even harder to do because it involves having to come to grips with forgetting to call on Monday, plus the guilt of putting it off on Tuesday! Calling them on Thursday wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the anxiety that’s still fresh from Monday’s forgetfulness, not to mention Tuesday’s guilt compounded with Wednesday’s! I would rinse and repeat this broken logic for three months until I finally bump into my friend one day on the street. Only then would I allow myself to blank-slate my way out of the procrastination paradox.

A quick tangent: As you may know, I am a big fan of Benjamin Franklin. According to Walter Isaacson’s book, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, the phrase “clearing the slate” originates with Benjamin Franklin’s practice of keeping track of his virtue slip-ups on a slate tablet. Is there anything we can’t attribute to this man?

I’ve discovered a few techniques over the years that have helped me improve my problem with procrastination, and I’d like to share these with you.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good

I think that a spirit of perfectionism lies at the heart of many procrastinators. One of the reasons that I haven’t posted to my blog more frequently is my insistence on only posting interesting content with perfect spelling and grammar. As a result, writing posts takes hours of time and I often decide against publishing what I write. With the exception of last year’s fifteen minutes of fame, I don’t typically have many readers. I don’t know why I hold this lousy blog up to such high standards. From this moment forward I promise to only write about boring subjects with bad spelling and horrible grammar!

Learn to run a dash

I read about this technique a few years ago from the wizard of time management, Merlin Mann, and I highly recommend that all procrastinators learn about this method straight from the source. This technique acknowledges that the hardest part about getting anything done is simply getting started. Running a dash encourages you to get a task started, and then quickly abandon it after ten minutes of working your butt off. Half of the time that you do this you’ll find yourself on such a kick that you actually won’t let yourself stop working until the task is finished. Even when this technique doesn’t trick you into completing your work, it will at least remove the anxiety associated with not having started at all.

While most U.S. citizens file their taxes on or before April 15th, this year I filed mine just before October 15th. I literally let four hours of work delay my taxes from being filed for almost six months. What finally got me past the procrastination paradox was a ten minute dash. I sat down with a text editor for ten minutes and created a bulleted list of the things that stood between me and my taxes from being completed. Then I played Warcraft for an hour. After getting my ass handed to me by a thirteen year old Brazilian (”jajaja, u suck”, he said), it was back to work. Four hours later my taxes were complete and I felt like I was one hundred pounds lighter.

Work like your hair is on fire

This piece of advice comes from Seth Godin and has also been lauded by Joel Spolsky. Timothy Ferriss gives very similar advice in his book, The 4-Hour Workweek. The advice is this: Simulate a really, really, really urgent situation for yourself (such as having hair on fire) and work yourself raw as if somehow getting your todos “todone” would end the urgency. As Timothy Ferriss puts it, pretend like you only have one hour to get an entire eight hours worth of work done.

Although this technique is new to me, I can already report it as being helpful. This method allows you to quickly triage your tasks and figure out what can be safely sacrificed in the name of getting things done. In order for this technique to be successful, it’s important to turn off your phone, avoid email, and eliminate all distractions that might prevent you from completing the task at hand.

This very blog post is proof that these techniques can work. About two hours ago I started writing this entry with a ten minute dash. After a twenty minute phone call with my girlfriend, I was back to work. Since then I’ve been writing as if my hair were on fire. I’ll be doing the same thing next Thursday, October 30th. That day has been completely blocked off on my company calendar as a “hair on fire day.” On this day I will shut myself off from the outside world until a colleague and I complete and release the new Field Expert web site.

Ten posts in ten days

I feel like I have the upper hand on procrastination lately, and I want to put myself to the test. I am hereby committing myself to writing (and more importantly, posting) ten blog posts in the next ten days. Yes, this counts as one of them.

A number of ideas have been gelling in my brain for the last few months, and I already have titles picked out for some of the things I’ll be writing about. These include:

• Highway traffic and the space time continuum
• Autobahn bathrooms and Aeron chairs
• Richard Dawkins’ selfish genes
• Brute forcing Gödel, Escher and Bach
• How DOTs can save money and improve roads

Forgive me, but I must quickly leave to run my hair under water and clear the air of that putrid, burnt dapper dan smell.