Procrastination

My dad bought me a book entitled Eat That Frog: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. Clearly, he knows his daughter well. And being the expert procrastinator that I am, the book sat on my shelf for several months. Until now.

I actually picked it up today to read it, and it's providing me with invaluable advice and direction.

I start every day with the best of intentions. As you can tell from my running blog, I do posses some discipline. But I've yet to find a way to impose that discipline on my self and my work. Which you think would be easy to do, because the majority of the goals I listed yesterday cannot be achieved without a certain level of income, which requires clients, which requires finding them, keeping them, and--my personal favorite--getting them to pay me on time.

In what was the most difficult year of my life, I managed to survive a divorce AND support myself financially through freelance work--no small feat. But I consistently found myself writing lists and coming up with ideas and failing to follow through on things as simple as returning a phone call or yes--reading a helpful book.

That ended today. I moved my desk to the downstairs bedroom, closed the door and went to work on my list. I just started plowing through it. No prioritization, no hemming and hawing, no wasted time on Facebook or BabyNames or People.com. And it was amazing what I accomplished in just one short hour! Two phone calls, three invoices with follow-up emails, three emails, four thank you notes and a call to my insurance company. In 60 minutes.

I have a tendency to justify my procrastination by insisting it is part of the "creative" process. As if I'm achieving the highest levels of free-spiritedness or artistry by shirking traditional and "limiting" concepts such as to-do lists, deadlines and spreadsheets. But I realized today--as it took me only fifteen minutes to email five potential clients I've been cultivating--that in order to achieve my goals, in order to get to a place where I can be totally creative and free and unencumbered by society's norms, I'm going to have to play the game.

So count me in.