How to beat procrastination and get your writing done!

by master October 16, 2015

Ah, procrastination. (enter the strains of The Graduate theme song) Hello darkness, my old friend, it’s so good to talk to you again… if you are like me, procrastination can lead you down a tunnel into the darker side of a writer’s life. Well, it just ain’t no fun, y’all. So we are going to beat up on procrastination a little bit.

According to Wikipedia, “Procrastination is the practice of carrying out less urgent tasks in preference to more urgent ones, or doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones, and thus putting off impending tasks to a later time, sometimes to the “last minute” before a deadline.”

That’s me to a tee on some days.

Some days I just want to spend my time playing endless rounds of word games instead of getting words down on a word doc in the form of a book or short story. Some times I do not WANT to be good and write my words. I want to procrastinate darn it!

So — how can we beat procrastination and get that writing done anyway?

So glad you asked!

There are a minimum of three ways to do this and all are pretty effective. I am sure there are more ways but I am writing on the fly as usual so I can only post three.

1. Give yourself a word count to accomplish every day. It can be as little as 100 words. That’s less than a full word page. If you have a goal to obtain, it might seem more like a game and less like work.

2. Convince yourself that you are going to be rewarded for that word count. When you finish writing those words, you will be able to get an Oreo cookie. Or a protein bar, or …. well, that’s up to you.

3. Decide you really want to do this. If you are being beat down in the encouragement dept. it could be why you cannot get started. And getting started is a pre-requisite.