Procrastination!!!

What I'm Doing to Avoid What I Should Be Doing!

Well, first of all, right now, what I’m doing to avoid what I should be doing is writing this Substack post. Not that I shouldn’t be writing something for you, lovely and loyal subscribers, to whom we already owe so much! But the thing is, I really should be working on next week’s podcast episode because it’s gonna take a minute. I am proud of myself for kinda sorta starting in on it. Starting is a huge step! But the next step is just something that I just don’t wanna take and so instead I have been…

Doing some loads of laundry! Oh man, if you ever have a task that you have been putting off for far too long, the best way to make yourself finally do it is to give yourself an assignment that you don’t want to do even more, then suddenly laundry seems like the best possible thing you could be doing right now! I love you for that laundry!

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Writing a poem. Okay, I don’t know if it’s a poem, because I honestly don’t know shit about poetry besides sometimes reading it* (*seeing it on Instagram) and thinking it’s pretty good. This might qualify less as a poem and more as a school journal entry that might prompt a call to my parents if I was growing up now instead of in the 80s and 90s. It goes:

Some die slowly.

Some die suddenly.

Some slowly begin a sudden death.

Some suddenly begin a slow death.

I am trying to be comfortable in my own skin, because I won’t always be in it.

I am trying to love the skin of everything. Me. You. Children. Cherries.

Bunnies. Doggies. Ponies. Monkeys.

Even little mice if they don’t get too close and make me scream.

I am trying to love everything that has skin, because as my Nana told me,

“The skin is the first thing to go.”

She meant wrinkles, and that is true. For any skin on anything.

But there’s another truth that’s too much to say. Too sad. Too gross!

About what happens to skin, eventually.

Right now, though, everything that has skin right now deserves my love. Right now.

Because we all still have skin in the game. And it is a good game.

I’m going to leave the poem right there without comment because I would just say it wasn’t very good and then you guys would feel like you had to give me a pep talk and I really don’t need one. I do love that you are so protective of me! I really do. But sometimes it’s fun to just write a mess and know it’s not the best and be fine with that. Especially when you are procrastinating.

The other thing I am doing instead of working on the podcast is clearing out storage on my Google account. I deleted a bunch of old unneeded audio files from the pod, which was the bulk of what was taking up space. Then I looked at my Gmail account and got rid of all the promotional emails, plus all the social media notifications. That didn’t do too much. Then I was messing around with the settings and realized that of the 20K emails still left, 17,000 of them are what Google would categorize as “Updates” aka, emails that are like, “Alert: Michael has joined your Zoom meeting!” for a Zoom meeting I was already sitting in and “We hope you are enjoying the new wall hooks you ordered from Hooks.com! We hope you are now hooked on us and that we can hook you up with any hooks you might need in the future!” Some meetings should be emails, but some emails definitely shouldn’t be at all. This could take hours. Hours of avoiding other work while I look at each email category, scan it for anything important, put it in the trash, empty the trash, feel satisfied that my storage went up by 1%, then panic that I deleted something important from 12 years ago.

I really want to go swimming and so I have made a deal with myself that I have to work on the podcast for 4 hours before I can take a break to get in the water. And I don’t like to get in much later than 5 o’clock because then the mosquitoes start to come out to join me. So, that means I HAVE to get started within the next 30 minutes if I want my treat. The question is, what am I gonna do with that 30 minutes, because it sure as hell isn’t gonna be starting the job that I’m avoiding. What kind of master procrastinator would I be if I stopped thinking of creative ways to avoid things and just did the work?

Are you a procrastinator? What is your favorite way to avoid what you should be doing? And, if you’re not a procrastinator at all, or you’re a reformed procrastinator, now is the time to brag about it and tell us your ways!