Productivity in Procrastination

I spent all last week staring down the calendar and wishing I could ignore a deadline. I was very nearly successful, too.

Irreantum is a literary journal for a Latter Day Saint audience, and every year they hold a contest for short fiction and personal essays. I know some people who have entered the contest and it’s done great things for them. I’ve also heard from agents and book editors that contests like these mean a whole lot for getting through the fog of unsolicited manuscripts. So with one of my big yearly goals being to write the first draft of my memoir, I thought this would be a good place to start.

But it meant I would actually have to start.

So instead I cleaned the house.

And then I organized my closets.

And the garage.

Then when I ran out of stuff to clean I sat down at the computer. Where I found more things to keep me distracted.

I have had a few massive scale projects in my head for awhile, but I’ve been putting them off because they involved some pretty intense pattern drafting or serious planning, and I just haven’t been motivated to deal with it.

You know what’s really motivating for a project you’ve been putting off? A project you want to put off even more. I spent hours and hours and hours last week making a pattern for this really large scale beading project, shopping around online trying to find the best deal, trying to find beads that reflected the subtle different colors of green I needed, and then more hours and hours and hours drafting a king sized quilt pattern where every block is completely different and needed to be exactly to scale. These projects have been in my head for over a year, but they both required so much work I kept them on the back burner. This week I was so desperate for something to distract me from the writing contest, that suddenly they sounded pretty attractive.

Thanks to some last minute inspiration from some online friends who are awesome, I actually got myself together and wrote what I’d been meaning to write, right at the last minute for eligibility. So by putting off a task, I somehow managed to accomplish three.

I smell a self help movement in here somewhere.