I woke up with that usual seesaw of to-do lists bouncing between my ears. My whining puppy finally rousted me from bed: I grabbed my clipboard and coffee to begin another hard day’s procrastination.
Your typical multitaskers, they might be checking voicemail and email while doling out directions to several coworkers on a morning like this. I was there earlier in my marketing life: we used to compare who had the most voicemail messages in a single day. I was pretty proud to break fifty, but I was among bona fide multitask mavens who had broken a hundred.
In those days I multitasked with the best of them. Now it’s up to me, and only me, to fulfill my immense capacity for trauma management and multi-task madness. For that, I rely primarily on multicrastination. Take today: I have one huge project to complete. All the other chickenscratches on my clipboard are the things I would love to do once the bulk of this assignment is off my shoulders. And here I am, multi-caffeinating:
multicaffeination – the multicrastinator’s friend: combine coffee, Mountain Dew, and chocolate for a 100 percent reliable mid-day sleep aid
All the while I’m adding more things to my to-do list and ultimately blaming my failure to start today’s big project on you, dear blog reader. Actually, I’ll take my defense in the words Harlan Ellison has taped to his typewriter (yes, typewriter— he keeps a supply of discontinued ribbons in the refrigerator):
Sat ci sat bene.
“It is done quickly enough if it is done well.”
— from Dreams with Sharp Teeth, the fascinating documentary on speculative fiction’s feistiest penman
Any writer can procrastinate, but for the really big projects that you need to put off a while longer, try swimming in an endless sea of things you really ought to be doing instead. As writing tutors we learned this was called “pre-writing,” that period before sitting down to the keyboard, when the best ideas foment (or ferment) in the backs of our otherwise utterly distracted minds.
For creative types, it’s sometimes hard to justify our long hours spent staring blankly out windows. If you find yourself in this position, nothing fools yourself or others better than long lists of things you appear to be coordinating. If that sounds like your bag, join the multicrastinators: we postpone more by noon than most people do all day.
Thanks for reading. Cheers,
Photo by AirplaneMouse
AHH, procrastination only increases in my retirement. Would much rather go for a long beach walk or listen to the summer bird songs than do those mundane chores that always seemed important before!!
GP