Overcoming procrastination?

 How good are you at procrastinating? I am incredible at it - in fact, it’s  probably my best skill. I can work right through my ironing pile, eat chocolate, find a book I want to reread, even do other worthy things like washing up, putting up a book review or encouraging someone to do something important - which is really ironic.

The thing is that if it were ironing I was meant to do, or cleaning, then I would probably keep putting it off. Sometimes I think about my W-i-P while I do mundane tasks, but if I’m not careful I will forget the glorious ideas I come up with while I’m cleaning the loo or decide they are not worthy of inclusion.

But as I’m a retired psychologist, I should have plenty of ways to overcome this problem. I should be able to analyse my reasons for putting things off (Fear of failure? Tension? Anxiety? Loss of direction?) but I don’t think psychologists are generally well-known for successfully treating themselves. 

Take relaxation. I have a very ambivalent view of this as applied to myself. I can write lovely relaxation scripts for other people, show them how to write their own, receive wonderful feedback on how they have helped. I am an expert in teaching restless people how to calm themselves down and sleep. Yet I stroll around wide-awake in the middle of the night completely unable to think of anything to do to relax and settle myself down to sleep.

So here is a simple writer’s progressive relaxation which may well help you next time you feel too uptight to write - or perhaps when you need to procrastinate usefully.

You can do this standing for best effect -  be ready to stretch and relax all parts of your body as you are imagining yourself in a large bookshop . . .

1. Stretch your right arm up as if you are reaching for your book which the bookseller has placed very high up - keep your hand up there long enough to think ‘It won’t be seen up there’ then, taking it from the top shelf, stealthily move it down to eye level and place it face outwards on the shelf. Drop your arm to let it hang loosely at your side.
2. With your left arm reach up for another book you have written and do exactly the same.
3. Take a few slow breaths, thinking about what you have done and feeling pleased as you turn your head slowly to the left, then to the right, looking at your books which are now on view.
4. Looking down to the floor you see a loose piece of paper saying ‘highly commended’. Bend over from the waist to pick it up, bending your legs to slowly stand up again. You are not sure what to do with this stray label, so you place it carefully on the shelf at eye height which just happens to be somewhere near your books.
5. The bookseller comes over to ask if she can help. As you utter ‘I’m fine thanks’, raise your shoulders in a shrug, letting the shrug gently fall away because you are remembering to slowly relax.
6. You walk slowly away from your books glancing first over one shoulder, then the other just checking that no-one has put your books up where they were. Your neck is nicely stretched and then relaxed.
7. In a sudden attack of conscience you consider putting your books back yourself, but assuage your guilt, and stretch your muscles, by reaching for two books from a top shelf, two from the bottom shelf and one that seems to have been on the middle shelf for the whole of the fourteen years you’ve been coming in the shop.
8. You pay for them and walk out of the shop feeling relaxed . . .

(. . . but in my case thinking of something else I can do before I am quite ready to write. I seem to have acquired a few books to read.)

Annie Try is the pen-name of Angela Hobday. 

Her fiction books include the Dr Mike Lewis stories -

Mike is a Clinical Psychologist who has clients with 

extraordinary adventures.  This series is published 

by Instant Apostle.