Anti-procrastination

From my (paper) notebook:

Haven’t blogged for a few days despite my crowing on Twitter about an Eureka! moment re procrastination.  It’s still worth writing about, even if I seem to lack the desire to sit at my PC these days. One of the techniques you’re taught as a strategy against procrastination is to break a job up into its requisite smaller tasks. This hasn’t really worked for me, as the tasks still loom as enormous THINGS TO BE DONE in my mind. This has now been overcome, I think, if I think of the job at hand as minor or small or not super important. I always seem to invest supreme importance to every job I have to do, which then paralyses me, because each task then assumes a major importance, and WHAT IF I FAIL? If I stop myself thinking about how important a task is this helps – I just have some minor tasks to do (write emails, talk to so-an-so, do such-and-such). Now I just have to train myself to think in such terms [about all jobs. Already done this in the last couple of days with a couple of outstanding things that needed doing].

It’s funny (sad?) that I have to trick myself like this, but I won’t complain if it means I don’t procrastinate as much. Had a similar realisation re my paper notebook. I’ve been using it occasionally to make notes and reflect during my daily commute. However if I think of it as a journal I don’t want to go near it, because I don’t have any thing worth journalling about. So, so long as it’s not a journal, an unjournal, I’m fine. As to the less-than-positive messages I must be giving myself (my work is not worthy, I will fail), I don’t know if this will stop them completely, but if I can trick myself by relabelling the things I need to do, I’m not going to complain. One thing’s for sure, this is an ongoing process.