Imagine this scenario: You are waiting for the bus, or washing your car, or running through Starbucks for the fourth time in three hours because you have a paper to turn in for Greg Spatz. Then you get an idea. It may be for a story, essay, or poem—it doesn’t matter. You have An Idea. It excites you. You write it down so you don’t forget it. You finish your Greg Spatz paper early, then find yourself with the Holy Grail of academia: Free Time. You turn on your computer. You open a Word document.
And then nothing happens. At all. You stare for a few minutes, hoping that the first line with somehow magically appear in your brain. Nothing. Nada. This is when you open Facebook, thinking, “I’ll futz around on the internet for ten minutes, and then write.”
For those of you for whom this works, this post is not for you, and you can please exit stage left pursued by a bear.
That's right. Move along.
For those of you like me, read on. When faced with the Blank Page of Doom, I typically do five things instead of actually writing.
I meant to write my first post a long time ago. A long, long time ago. Like the first week of July. But, there were so many reasons-slash-excuses not to. At first, I’d just finished my thesis, and I was tired. Both my weary brain and my laptop’s overworked cooling system needed to take it easy. Then I went on vacation, and when I got back, I was too busy catching up on work. Then I had some freelance assignments to finish. And so on for the next two months—procrastination at its finest.
Even now, after the things on my official to-do-first list have all been checked off, I am still only writing this post because I forced myself to.
I am not one of those writers who “has” to write. I write because I make myself. Sure, I love it, kinda: writing helps me understand myself and other people, it gives me a voice and an audience, it takes me into pockets of the world I would never have explored otherwise. It makes the gears in my head start turning.
It also sucks. We all know this. As Dorothy Parker said, “I hate writing; I love having written.”
But stuff just kept coming up. I’d forget about it then remember it when I had something else to do. I’d think about writing it, then decide to “summerize” my apartment or go for a stroll and take photos for a different blog. I never even opened a word document.
Writer’s love talking about procrastination, what they do before they can get anything done. (I’ve had one person tell me that he can’t keep number two pencils in sight, because he’ll sit and sharpen them all.) And I love to hear people talk about how they procrastinate. I know that I usually realize my desk looks like a set piece in a college dorm and must be tidied. And if I were a Studs Terkel kind of oral historian, I’d collect a bunch of stories on the subject and document the common American’s experience with procrastination. Or maybe I would just think about documenting it all and end up fixing the seat on my bicycle.
A few weeks ago, I read Asa’s post about how Nora Roberts out-laps everyone except Teddy Roosevelt when it comes to getting things done. Asa mentioned that she maybe didn’t get enough writing done due to mighty procrastination efforts. The encyclopedia of the people and by the people says that we procrastinate when the thing we must do causes anxiety and might be a sign of an underlying psychological disorder (the DSM IV lists it under “Work Disorders”).
But I don’t think that this particular disorder–recurrent, without severe psychotic features–is necessarily bad. People talk about “structured procrastination” now, and how you actually get a lot accomplished when avoiding the one thing that you are supposed to doing. Robert Benchley wrote a great little essay about getting things done when not writing his articles. And that was 1949. It’s the same psychological thing “experts” talk about then they recommend letting your employees look at Facebook or their blog roll for fifteen minutes out of every hour–procrastination can make people more productive.
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