Beat Procrastination with Writing
Writing is the solution, trust me
You know that you should do something and, for that very reason, you do something else.
That’s procrastination.
The power of procrastination is built upon this pattern. In turn, this pattern is based on automatisms. It deals with the same automatisms that make us take the phone and scroll through Instagram instead of learning something new, or doing whatever we planned to do.
The good news is that when automatism is the key, over there there’s a habit (or many habits) in action. This is good because we just need to dissolve that habit to defeat procrastination,
So, how to beat a habit?
Replace with a better alternative
Instead of turning your phone on, take a piece of paper and write.
No matter what you write. The goal is to put your thoughts outside you and control them; no need to win the Pulitzer Prize!
By definition, habits are made up of actions we do for the only reason we have consistently done them until now.
Take a piece of paper and write.
From this standpoint, habits collapse the timeline into an eternal present.
There is no past because the near past is the repetition of the habits themselves. And the far past is no longer meaningful, as it is not consistent with the habits.
On the other hand, there is no future too, since habits repeat themselves always the same. So, the future is indistinguishable from the present.
That is even more true when the habit is procrastination because its crucial facet is the lack of awareness. Awareness makes us able to distinguish things.
Awareness can scare us, but its lack is even scarier. When we are not aware of time, we cannot visualize our future. So, we do not have a future.
Then, what is a better alternative to procrastination as a habit?
Writing is the alternative
The new habit must be simpler than the previous one. This facilitates the transition.
What is simpler than staying prisoner in a room? Be able to open the door and escape.
With procrastination, we are prisoners inside our unawareness, the jail. The door to open to escape is exactly its opposite: awareness.
Let me show why awareness requires writing:
- Once you write, you can read. That means that you can visualize yourself from outside yourself. Awareness requires this distance between you observer and you observed.
- Writing changes the writer because it moves thoughts from inside to outside. Awareness requires the ability to change.
- What you write is written, meaning that it is something of you in the past that makes you immediately be your future. Awareness requires the possibility of moving along time.
All that by the simple gesture of jotting thoughts down on a piece of paper. Be careful: not a tablet, a phone, a laptop, but an old-style paper.
Conclusion
On the Internet, there are plenty of wise suggestions on how to get rid of procrastination. I tried most of them, with no success.
Take a piece of paper and write.
Then I started writing and the magic happened.
Trust me and try. And let me know ;)
