Friday night I took a deep breath and put my procrastination aside so that I could finish a second round of copyediting for my friend’s novel, which I’ve been saying that I would do since August. Every day I would have the thought “tonight I will do it,” and every day I would end up ignoring the reminder and find a distraction to keep me occupied until bedtime, usually in the form of binge-watching some TV show.
I watched the Challenger documentary, I watched Weeds again from the beginning, I watched the Chris Watts text-message documentary, I started watching House MD from the beginning again. There is always something to watch, and there is always an excuse to not do what I said I would do. I have had a problem with procrastinating all my life. When I was in school, it would take me hours to finish my homework every night. It’s not that I couldn’t do the work, I just didn’t want to. I would rather draw in my notebook or look out the window and daydream instead. Not much has changed. I think I might have an executive function disorder.
This past Friday night though, I guess I had had enough. I thought about settling in for an evening of season five of my favorite medical procedural but decided to “just do the friggin thing,” like the poster I made and hung above my toilet says to do.
“Please just do the friggin thing,” because yes I do need to be reminded it seems.
Sometimes I am struck with this kind of motivation to follow through on tasks I’ve been putting off, and when that feeling comes I do my best to follow its lead. Instead of going to Netflix or Prime Video or Youtube, I opened up my Google Drive and found the document that I had last opened August 4th. When I don’t have a deadline, then the pressure is really on me to just make myself start. Starting is the hardest, but once I get going I am good. I started reading and copyediting again from the beginning. It only took me a couple of hours to reread the novel and make comments about the continuity errors that I had passed over the first time I read the novel, when I was more engrossed in the story than I was in finding holes. It only took a couple hours and it felt good to do. Like I was doing something that wasn’t purely selfish.
After I emailed the edited doc to my friend, I rewarded myself by spending the rest of Friday watching House MD. And because it felt so good to finish a task I had started 3 months ago, I spent the rest of the weekend inside (even though the weather was nice and the AQI has been really good finally) watching whatever else I wanted to watch: the last season of The Good Place, the entirety of The Haunting of Bly Manor, and that show You, which is basically a ripoff of Dexter if Dexter were a hipster incel creep with no charisma. I liked comparing everything I watch to Dexter.
I still have to finish the first draft of my novel. I haven’t worked on it since the middle of August. I’ve been thinking about it, though, and that is definitely part of the process. I’ve already made a lot of changes to the story in my head. The thing about writing, for me, is that time is so important, having enough blocked out time where I’m not expected to do anything else, time snuggled between procrastination buffers so I can get the restlessness out of my system and feel compelled to work. It was really great when I took a week off to write. I had 4 or 5 days of real writing in between two lazy weekends. I was able to ease out of job mode into lazy mode into motivated mode and then back into lazy mode before having to go back to work. This is not an ideal system. I would prefer to be able to just friggin write when I have the thought to, but until I figure that out this will have to do.