Stop Procrastinating and Write Your Damn Book!
One of the biggest struggles for writers is procrastination. Whether you’re still in the planning and outlining phase, working through your first draft, or firmly in the revision phase, if procrastination has a hold on you, it can feel incredibly difficult to overcome.
But here’s the sneaky thing about procrastination: it doesn’t always look like something we can control. Procrastination can look like being too busy with other tasks that we can’t not do. For example, procrastination can look like folding laundry, making dinner, changing the bedsheets, working on a paid project…the list goes on and on and on.
The reality is that procrastination is a product of fear. When a task feels challenging or scary and threatens our ego, our brain attempts to protect us from taking that hit by avoiding the task altogether. And our brain will go to great lengths to convince us that anything and everything is more important and/or urgent than our writing. Hence why you see so many writers folding clothes or scrubbing grout when they should be writing.
But you don’t have to be stuck in an endless procrastination cycle. Here’s how you can overcome the fear, stop procrastinating, and finally write your damn book!
Why We Procrastinate
For some writers, they recognize on a conscious level that writing their book feels scary and intimidating. But for many others, that fear isn’t conscious. They procrastinate writing, they know they struggle to sit down and stare at that blank page, and yet that’s don’t understand why.
If you’re struggling with procrastination, your brain is trying to protect you from something. What that is, exactly, varies from person to person, but procrastination is your brain’s way of shielding you from the negative outcomes it fears.
Often when writers are struggling with procrastination, the advice they’re given is about forcing themselves to ignore the other tasks and get their butt in the chair. But this only addresses the symptom, not the cause, of the procrastination.
Instead, if you recognize procrastination as a symptom of something bigger, then you can begin to look for the underlying issue causing it. And if you can identify the underlying issue, then you can work to resolve it.
And if you can resolve the underlying issue, you’re less likely to continually struggle with procrastination in the future.
How to Identify the Underlying Problem
So, how do you identify that underlying problem? This can take some concerted effort, but if you can learn to pay attention to the thoughts going through your mind when you’re procrastinating with other tasks or struggling to keep your butt in the chair during writing time, these thoughts will give you clues about the underlying problem causing your procrastination.
(Read More: What’s Really Stopping You From Writing Your Novel?)
For example, if you carve out writing time, sit down at your computer, then have a sudden urge to get up and do the dishes in your sink, try to pinpoint what thought ran through your mind right before your dishes became the most pressing task at hand. Maybe it was something like “I have no idea what comes next—I’m clearly not a real writer,” or maybe that voice sounded more like “I don’t deserve writing time if there’s a sink full of dirty dishes.” Both thoughts are clues that can help you determine the underlying cause of your procrastination. If you had the first thought, you may be struggling with imposter syndrome. If you had the second thought, you may be struggling with self-worth and feeling as though you don’t deserve the time to do things that are important to you.
Try keeping a journal handy so you can easily jot down thoughts as they crop up during your writing time. It can take some practice to catch these thoughts as they happen since they often occur quickly and then segue into other thoughts (such as “I have to do the dishes), but if you can train yourself to be on the lookout for these thoughts, you’ll find valuable clues to help you battle your procrastination.
Overcoming Procrastination
Once you identify the root cause of your procrastination, the next step is to work to overcome that obstacle.
This step is not easy. Tackling our self-limiting beliefs and mental blocks is challenging, especially since these thoughts are usually automatic and, therefore, easily mistaken for facts rather than the faulty beliefs they are. Consciously watching for these thoughts and then working to counter them is hard but worth the effort.
The methods you’ll use to overcome your procrastination will vary depending on the underlying cause you identified. For example, if you identified your underlying cause as being imposter syndrome, then you might spend some time working on challenging your thoughts around what makes a person a writer and keeping a success journal to remind yourself of your accomplishments and the “proof” that you are a writer.
If you find that a fear of failure is holding you back, you might try switching from setting outcome-based goals (such as signing with an agent) to effort-based goals (such as writing for 30 minutes daily). You’ll want to spend some time normalizing rejection and reframing your thoughts around failure.
As you can see, the work required to overcome your underlying cause for procrastination is likely to be emotionally challenging. It will require confronting core beliefs you hold about yourself and/or the world and working to shift those beliefs so they are no longer at odds with your goal of writing a book. That’s no small task, yet the payoff of being able to finally make progress with your writing rather than constantly battling procrastination is worth the effort.
You could continue to force your butt into a chair until a timer goes off. You could continue trying different writing times and spaces until you find one that keeps you away from the distractions vying for your attention during writing time. And you might have some success, at least for a little while. But the reality is that if you don’t address what’s causing you to procrastinate in the first place, you will continually bump up against this obstacle. Putting in the effort to identify the root of your procrastination and then work to overcome it will set you up for success much better in the long run than simply trying to ignore the urge to procrastinate.
If you’re struggling to identify your underlying cause and/or to overcome that underlying cause, working with a book coach can be helpful. A book coach has more emotional distance from the situation than the individual dealing with it, so they are often more clearly able to see what might be keeping you from writing, and they can guide you with questions and exercises to help you identify and overcome whatever is at the root of your procrastination.
