DRAFT
Have you ever had a day completely cleared out for your most important work and then you get nothing done? This has happened to me many, many times.
On one recent day, I had a full day set aside mostly to work on my then-unlaunched blog and podcast. I was going to write, work on my podcast, and contemplate some teaching plans. I would avoid news, sports, and other distractions during the day and focus on the work. I had spent most of my teaching-free summer up to this point overfocusing, like so many of us, on the minute-by-minute updates on the latest firestorm (cliche) erupting out of Washington, D.C.
That day was going to be different. I would be more, as they say, intentional. I had a plan and a schedule and had made a promise to myself, a promise that I believed would be easy to keep because my own creative projects should always be able to hold my attention.
But, as you've guessed by now, that was not to be.
I’d like to blame the president, since I spent most of the day feverishly immersed in the current political situation in the U.S. I read coverage from newspapers and a range of online sites, listened to podcasts, watched television coverage on my laptop, and monitored terrestrial radio developments and recorded parts of talk shows on my kitchen cassette deck for later listening. I am complete and total in my methods of distraction and I employ digital as well as analog means.
I can’t blame Trump, and I can’t blame the media. Nor can I blame the sudden appearance of two splotchy brown areas on my left arm that immediately made me think…MELANOMA.
Nope, I can’t blame the prospect of cancer because it only occupied my brain for about five minutes. I’ll get it checked out, sure, but it didn’t distract me that day.
What distracted me was what Steven Pressfield calls “capital-R” Resistance. I just didn’t want to buckle down and do the work, even though the work that I had prioritized for the day was the cool shit. Because I had recently read that you are most productive if you focus on one particular task for 2-3 hours, I arranged my day in blocks.
I would spend three hours of time writing or revising blog posts for my supposedly soon-to-launch blog.
I would spend three hours of time in the planning/prep process for the classes I’m teaching at Berklee in a few very short weeks.
I would read a few articles about the criminal justice system in preparation for a podcast interview I’m conducting on Thursday morning.
And I wanted to spend 2-3 hours working on a freelance web QC project – the only thing I was going to do today that would earn me cold hard cash.
Didn’t do that either.
It’s a damn shame.
The weather perfectly conspired on my behalf – shitty, cold, rainy. Probably the worst weather ever on that July day in Boston. I read a little bit, I did some laundry, I ran a few errands, ate too much food and checked in often for news about Jared Kushner’s closed-door testimony in the Senate. But the truth is, I wasn’t even interested in that.
continues rewriting here.The only good thing I can say is that about 8 minutes ago, I felt that I needed to confront this procrastination thing and instead wrote about it not in that whiny way that I have in my journal for the past 35 years but instead tried to deal with it as a blog post. So that’s a good thing. I made that decision a few minutes ago, and already I’ve drafted more than 400 words of a future potential blog post.
Usually when you get to the end or some part of a blog post like this, the writer has some great suggestions for you, relating to how you might learn from the writer’s struggles and apply them to your own life. They come to you in bulleted points. And, yeah, I’m going to do that. But first, let me tell you what thing I did first, just before writing the post, this sloppily drafted up post that just went over 500 words.
