Today I tackle one of the biggest boogie monsters for freelancers and consultants: procrastination.
Before you run for the hills in either fear or boredom, let me explain. I’ve done tons of reading on this topic, and finally found a simple method for all types of procrastinators.
No one is immune to putting work off until the last minute. At some point or other all “skilled” workers go through this. When it happens to me, procrastination seems to stem from a deeper problem: perfectionism. I procrastinate because I can’t bear to witness how far a project is from completion (i.e. an episode of the podcast). When a project gets messy I stop work to think about how to fix it, and this leads to analysis paralysis. Soon enough I find myself looking for something fun to distract me from the unfinished work.
So lately I’ve realized the best way to fight this is to keep the momentum going, no matter what. The key is to have multiple projects going at once. When I can’t figure one out, I simply switch over to the next one. The second one becomes “a break” from the first one I’m stuck on.
You’ll notice in the photo up top that I have three tabs open, labeled OSIT103, OSIT104, and OSIT105. Those are three separate episodes of my podcast Or So I Thought. I’m in the outlining/writing phase of each of these upcoming episodes.
More often though, I’ll have one episode started, while also having a blog post in progress, all the while working on the week’s newsletter. The blog post and newsletter are my distractions from the podcasting.
The hand-lettering artist and author Jessica Hische has been writing about this for a while. She calls this “procrastiworking” and defines it like this:
Procrasti-working is any work you choose to do to avoid working on what really matters.
Jessica Hische, artist and author
Then, one of two things will happen. The best-case scenario is that while working on the second piece I get a great idea for the first piece. When this happens I simply switch back to the first project and continue until I finish it, or I get stuck again. If stuck, I can again switch back to the second thing.
The second scenario of what could happen is that I get stuck on the second thing without any ideas of how to fix the first project. So the solution here is to have a third project going that will allow me to procrastinate on the second one.
If I keep this going without losing too much momentum in the switching, eventually something gets finished. Great success!
