Freelancers and Procrastination - How to Embrace Your Idle Mind
‘There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do…’ If you find yourself reflecting on this quote too long, you’ve probably fallen into the trap again – letting your mind drift away from the key tasks that await you. Here we revisit an annoying old friend. Procrastination, from hell’s heart, I stab at thee…
For the uninitiated, the quote was inspired by Bill Watterson, creator of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip and when I first read it, it struck a loud, jarring chord.
Why can’t we focus our minds on the things we want to do? And should we shy away from this, or was Watterson closer to the truth than we might want to believe – that we want to do nothing, that there might be value in doing nothing, and it forms part of the other side of the coin that is productivity.
Is modern life causing an attention deficit?
Be honest – how many of you are reading this with a podcast on in the background? Or the TV droning? Or, in my case, both together.
This is the modern way. My personal journey is routed not just in avoiding key tasks, but in embracing idleness and celebrating the ADHD that has always skulked in the background of my life.
For me, the TV and audio background noise is comforting. Far from distracting me from work, it actually facilitates work and allows me to relax, akin to white noise. As it drones peacefully on, I can get on with work, whereas silence lets my mind really wander, and when it does it tends to wander to unpleasant things, and anxiety finds a way in.
Another side to procrastination that I’ve experienced is routed in a kind of problem-solving. There is value in contracting and releasing the muscle of your mind - focussing on complexity and then allowing your subconscious to work in the background, whether it’s to solve a major life decision or simply find a way around a problem with a written piece.
I first stumbled on this idea while listening to Josh Waitzkin discuss his approach to learning on the Tim Ferriss show. If you reach a difficult problem in your work and the answer is not apparent, you can focus on the problem deeply and then stop, by letting your mind wander and doing something completely different.
For me, this tends to be mindless Reddit browsing. It sparks gentle, unobtrusive thoughts and in that process of relaxing, something is released, and I can circle back to the problem from another angle, and make progress.
Are procrastination and avoidance normal?
But back to the first point, is procrastination often just avoiding the difficult? I think in many cases, yes. When a difficult task presents itself, our instinct is to avoid it. For me, it used to be the boring parts of writing – researching a topic, building structure, and ensuring keywords were in place. What I love is stream-of-consciousness typing, and thinking about ideas. But sadly, this doesn’t always lead to the best writing, on the contrary, it is self-indulgent and therefore fundamentally bad writing.
A book I love that explores this aspect of the creative process is Eat That Frog, by Brian Tracy. The concept is simple – you should start your working day with the most important tasks, and get them out of the way. The power of this book is that it begins with the assumption that you are avoiding the things you need to do. Once you get past this cognitive self-deception you are free to take action – to make the plan, do the research, and put the structure in place. Once it’s done, you can bash keys to your heart’s content and think about ideas. Content writers need to hear this more than most I realised, as ‘research’ can easily merge into distraction.
Embrace the idleness of your mind
But, is there a place for just mindless idleness, even when no difficulty really exists? Can motivation just leave you, and not return? Again, I think it can. We are complex creatures, with different levels of conscientiousness and turbulence baked into our personalities. Some of the more creative minds are the most open – they are not task-focussed and are fundamentally flaky.
This is part of the creative process for blog writers - a wandering mind is an open mind. When you are not focussed, ideas can find their way to you. There is a softness about a wandering mind that is rife for creativity, whereas a task-focussed mind is harder, more unyielding.
It is the softness of the creative mind that I identify with the most as a professional writer. It lets me form new ideas and play with words. It lets me think about my view, and the opposing view, and then think about the idea of views themselves and the nature of opinions. It lets me dig into the foundations of an idea and maybe if I’m lucky, say something new, or something beautiful. Keats famously spoke on truth and beauty (beauty is truth and truth beauty; that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know) and we can find both through the creative process if we open ourselves up to the full range of experience, procrastination and all.
Enjoy the post? Check out some others below. Think I’m wrong? Let me know, and we can argue about it in the comment section until one of us gets bored.
