Today is Fight Procrastination Day. Oh boy, another holiday exhorting me to do something. I look around at my incredibly messy living room workspace and think, “How can I turn this to my advantage?” I’ve been meaning to clean the living room for years, and I do get around to it. The only problem is that it is a huge job. I do about 3% of it, get busy with something else, and it gets worse. Repeat ad infinitum. Thanks to this site, I plucked the most useful of tips for at least getting a foot in the door to organization.
Useful Tip: “Don’t put any “to-do” on your list that takes more than 30 minutes.” I am eternally throwing up my hands when I realize just how many preparatory steps there are to a simple “clean the living room” pledge. If you saw my living room, you’d understand. I don’t even have enough room in here to properly do a yoga stretch session. Boxes are everywhere, half unpacked from the rushed evenings when my husband yells at me, “Find this book, immediately!” The book is something I put up two years ago and have forgotten all about, but he apparently hasn’t thought to tell me about it until the night before he needs it.
You might thumb your neat-freak nose at me and say, “Why don’t you just replace everything when you’re done?” Well, I do that many times, but often the place is so wrecked by the frantic mole-like digfest that replacing everything would take me until 3 a.m. or later. I’m not willing to give up that much sleep to have a neat living room.
“What about doing it the next day?” Well, in the morning, it is another mad rush and several more last-minute demands, as well as many rapid-fire daily chores that won’t wait. “Procrastinating” on dish-washing in this household is me waiting until after lunch to do them, not just because I hate food waste but because I live in a one-bedroom cabin with NO extra space for anything. I have to get the dirty dog bowls off the stove if I want to make lunch, and so on. So the regular chores kick in, and I put off cleaning the living room yet again.
So, I read on my Twitter this morning that it’s “Fight Procrastination Day,” or some such thing. And I think, “Oh good! Some e-inspiration this morning! I need to do that next basic Japanese lesson over at Nihongoup and I need to finally sign up for and post a blog to supplement my activities on Yahoo! Contributor Network and the Facebook/Twitter axis. I get my head full of grand ideas as I wash those pesky dog bowls and load the washing machine with Tropical Depression Lee-soaked dirty clothes and towels.
Then I sit down here and wonder what I should start first. The problem is: in order to do the Japanese lesson, I need my notebook and a writing implement. Where are they? Scratch. To make an online blog, I need to research the best one to sign up for. I also need a notebook to write down the illogical and totally un-guessable passwords I’ll be forced to create. I’ll also need a first post idea. How about Fight Procrastination Day?
And then the dominoes of momentum fall, and I find myself here, writing this article before I’ve cracked the katakana writing practice notebook or coaxed my memory-deficient computer into visiting Blogger, WordPress, Scribd, or whatever. I even consider Myspace, since I have an old account there, but where’s that password? Scratch again.
At least I’ve accomplished something. I’ve moved my fingers for about 20 minutes (within the recommended block of time according to Online Organizing.com). Five seconds after typing in the blogger.com address (as a crude form of multitasking), I realize it is telling me to sign in with my Google Account. Strange, I never remember signing up for a Google Account. As I’ve always suspected, momentum has a lot to do with productivity. The secret is to influence that momentum. A thought fleets through my brain that this is how Google is taking over the world.
If I head over to Y!CN and post this, I’ll just fill that first 30 minute block that I haven’t written down or planned for – yet. Well, I guess making the list is #2 on the list! What are you doing for “Fight Procrastination Day?” (Perhaps getting over “Be Late for Something Day” from yesterday?)
Thanks goes out to Lyn Lomasi, who retweeted the Yahoo article that got this ball rolling!