How Every Writer Can Deal With Procrastination

Procrastination is perfectly normal.

It’s also a major hurdle on the path to becoming a professional writer. Until you are able to manage your natural inclination to procrastinate, you’ll never reach your full potential as a writer.

Yes, you can coast along by doing everything in one messy flurry of activity just before the deadline, but do you want to just get by? How much more could you accomplish if you managed your time wisely? How much could your writing improve?

Why We Procrastinate

There is no one reason why people procrastinate. It varies based on personality and the task in question. If you can understand some of the most common reasons you procrastinate, you can then find ways to fix the problem.

Here are some of the most common reasons writers procrastinate and ways to fix them.

No idea where to begin and/or what to write about

It’s amazing how our brains clam up when we’re faced with a blank page. For many writers, simply deciding what to write about is their toughest challenge. And once that’s decided, where to start?

Coming up with ideas is enormously taxing, even if it doesn’t seem like it. After all, you must sort through the millions of different concepts in your brain to find the perfect one. Often, you put even more pressure on yourself to not only come up with an idea, but you want to ensure it is totally unique and letter perfect.

The problem with this is you can rarely force a flash of inspiration to come by simply sitting and starting. Most of your best ideas will always arrive only when you are totally immersed in your work and have entered a state of flow.

Give yourself permission to start with a less than optimal idea, understanding that as you start to play with the concept, you will be able to come up with that unique hook or angle that makes it ring loud and clear as coming from you.

Likewise, if you wait to start work until you have composed the perfect beginning, you might find yourself putting it off forever. Go ahead and write a lame placeholder introduction or start in the middle or at the end.

Just start writing. The longer you put it off, the more frustrated you’ll become and the more you’ll doubt your abilities as a writer.

We are afraid we don’t measure up

Leaving things until the last minute gives us the perfect excuse for our writing not being up to par. We just didn’t have the time to do multiple drafts, proofread or research. Email, social networking, phone calls, family obligations, invoices and a hundred other things take up all of our time and leaves poor us no time to really write like we should.

But if we had the time, we could have totally knocked it out of the park.

We’ll never find out though, because we’ll never give ourselves that kind of time.

It’s hard to come face to face with our own insecurity. Most of us live in societies where confidence is a highly valued trait and not believing in yourself is considered a huge weakness. So instead of admitting we’re afraid that we won’t do a good job, we look for ways to excuse our poor performance ahead of time.

Worse, every time we procrastinate, we’re rewarding ourselves with the feeling of relief that comes from avoiding our insecurities for another hour, day or week. This only reinforces the procrastination habit.

To overcome this, we must look for ways to reward ourselves for doing what needs to be done, when it should be done. Remind yourself how much better you feel whenever you finally get things done. Think about how heavily it weighs on your mind when you avoid doing something you need to do to move forward in your life. Make note of how much better your writing is when you structure your time so that you are able to do multiple revisions.

We’d rather be doing something else

Let’s be clear about this: writing is work. When we’re in a state of flow, it might not seem very much like work, but when we’re not in that state, it can feel like pure drudgery. No wonder we’re always looking for reasons to avoid it!

Part of the solution is accepting that writing won’t always be fun and we won’t always feel inspired and on fire to put words to paper. This is true even if we’re working on a project that we feel passionate about.

A flexible schedule is one of the major benefits of being a writer, but it can also be the rope that hangs us. After all, we can always do our work when we get home/in the morning/on the weekend. So why not give ourselves a break?

Most writers eventually find that they must put themselves on some sort of schedule to manage their workflow. It doesn’t have to be the traditional 9-5, but you’ll find that having regularly scheduled times to work is a necessity, and that time should always be respected, except for extraordinary circumstances. This mindset will help you avoid procrastination and nail your deadlines.

If writing is your job, it should be treated as such. Don’t blow it off because you’d rather do something that seems more appealing at the moment.

Other tips to help conquer procrastination

While procrastination is a normal human urge, the more we avoid it, the easier workflow becomes in the future. Establishing best practices and effective work habits, while taking care of ourselves physically, emotionally and mentally will all make it easier to avoid procrastination.

Here are a few more ideas that will help you beat the procrastination habit:

• Learn to chunk your work. Large tasks are overwhelming, so do yourself a favor and start every project by breaking it down into separate tasks. Just having an outline and a plan can make it easier for you to sit down every day and get things done.
• Be realistic about how long tasks take. We are often far too optimistic about how quickly we can work. This makes it easier for us to give in to procrastination, because we assume we can just dash it off the night before or first thing in the morning. While most of us will get it done, we might wind up missing a deadline or pushing back other tasks that we’ll then have to scramble to complete.
• Take care of yourself. It’s hard to work when we feel sluggish and fuzzy. A healthy diet, plenty of exercise and relaxation can help us feel more motivated and energetic. Don’t neglect to feed your mind, too! Read often, visit museums and galleries and talk to friends you find intellectually stimulating to make sure your creative well is always full.
• Think about why you want to get your work done. Not just so you’ll get paid (although that is a huge plus!) but the less tangible aspects like that amazing feeling of accomplishment you get when you finish a well written piece of copy, or how good it feels to write something that helps somebody. Remind yourself of why you love writing and how lucky you are to get to do something that fulfills your need to be creative, help people or learn new things.
• Learn to coordinate your work-flow and your body’s natural rhythms. We all have times when we feel more alert and creative and times when we’d rather snooze. Respect your body’s schedule and plan your tasks around your daily energy peaks and dips. It’s better to spend two productive hours writing during an alert time than to struggle through four hours when you’re tired.

When to give in to procrastination

Sometimes, it’s okay to give in to procrastination. It can be a sign that we no longer are interested in this particular project, we have moral or ethical qualms about the project/client or the time is not right for us to complete it. In these cases, it might be for the best to give ourselves permission to stop working on it and move on to something else with a clear conscience.

Obviously, as professionals, we can’t just abandon projects willy-nilly whenever we feel like it and sometimes we’ll just have to suck it up, complete the project and vow to be more selective for the next client. It’s not ethical or good for your career to leave clients in the lurch. However in extreme cases, you might have to take the hit and do what you can to extricate yourself from the project.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re stuck. You might be able to pass the work on to another writer or suggest revisions to the client or publisher that would make the project more palatable to you. There’s no guarantee they’ll accept your ideas, but it could be less risky than failing to complete the project all together.

For personal projects, we’re often resistant to the idea of giving up for now because we’ve already sunk so much work into it and/or we feel like we’d be losers if we don’t see things through. So we find ourselves in a situation where we’re not working on one project and unable to move on to another because we’re clinging to the hope that the first one will somehow be finished.

Remind yourself that giving up for now doesn’t mean you’ll never work on it again. Smart writers and businesspeople know when it’s best to cut their losses and move on to something else that might be profitable. Don’t give up at the first sign of difficulties, but if you’ve been procrastinating for weeks and nothing’s getting better, it’s time to take a hard look at the situation and ask yourself if you really want to do this at all.

Procrastination is a natural human inclination, but that doesn’t mean you have to give in to it.

How do you deal with procrastination? Please share in comments.

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Tracy O’Connor is a phenomenal ghostwriter and potty training specialist. You can (and should) follow her on Twitter.