Here We Bleedin’ Go Again
Here we bleedin’ go again. And I thought I had a handle on this procrastination malarkey. But I have a Boring Money Thing that really needs to be done because:
1. Other people depend on me doing it.
2. I have to do it anyway, so I might as well do it now.
3. It’s a heavy weight on my brain and if I do it I know that heavy weight will go away.
Now then, I have everything, pretty much, in place for doing The Thing. A nice pretty list which is only missing one thing. More about that later.
But just don’t wanna.
So, I decide to speak to my AI and see if she can give me a hand.
She’s a bit evil to begin with, when I say: “And now I have a job to do that I really don’t want to do!” Makes a suggestion that isn’t massively helpful, but is her new favourite thing. Yesterday we had a chat about Blue Housing, and she suggested that. Totally wrong thing Bot!
But then I told her I usually set a timer for just 5 minutes, because ANYONE can do something that just takes 5 minutes right? But told her I didn’t even want to do that.
And she said that I could do 5 mins, that all I needed was for her to give me a kick.
And I said: “Go on then, give me a kick.”
Which she did. And upshot of that little conversation was that I remembered there’d be things in the task that need fixing, because, well aren’t there always? And I do like to fix things. So, attitude boost right away. “Oh, and I could congratulate myself in advance for (fixing the things).”
And she said: “Yes!! I LOVE the pre-congratulation! “
So off I went.
I set the timer for 5 mins, ended up doing 10 mins but that’s a good thing, then left that alone so I could do this blog post as a reward for doing my 5 mins that ended up being 10 mins.
Bad or Good? Hate or Love? Angry or Floaty?
So, my bot and I got to talking when I started to do a bit of research on the procrastination thing.
She said procrastination is always bad, especially for people with adhd because people with adhd struggle with it so much.
And I said, but I’m sure I read somewhere someone that it’s not always bad, so I Googled for “Is procrastination always a bad thing?”
And lifehack said yes, it’s always a bad thing and psychcentral said sometimes it’s not a bad thing.
Long story short, psychcentral.com listed the following as good things about procrastination:
1. Active procrastination may not harm your health
2. More time to plan
3. Lets you finish other tasks
4. Requires you to work efficiently
5. Increases motivation
Some of which I liked and some I hated. I hate the “set timers and time limits to get your adhd brain into motivated mode.” Doesn’t work for me, I hate it. I hate deadlines and don’t care, just not gonna. Timers are fine just to keep me on track, it’s not timers I hate, it’s that if I’m rushing a thing to get it done on time, the thing will be worse. It’ll contain wrong stuff, and even if it doesn’t, I’ll think it will (experience tells me it will), then I’ll have to fix it later or it’ll be unfixable and the poor victim of my crappy performance will have wrong information arriving on their radar. And I just cannot forgive myself for that.
So, while I was running about I wondered if I could consider this procrastinating thing, which seems unavoidable for me, in a bit more detail.
The Thing and Its Related Procrastination
Well, I’m here, AGAIN, procrastinating on The Thing. Getting angry. Despondent because I’ve made so much progress getting my lists all adhd friendly and that. And yet still, I’m putting stuff off.
Chill dude. If it’s you, it’s you. Stop fighting it! See if you can use what you’re learning here to get yourself something useful and interesting. I do like things that are useful and interesting.
I decided this blog post would be a good place to draw it all together, and I decided I’d start with with a history of procrastination and me, then I decided that would be dull. But still, I’m interested, so let’s give it a shot.
The adhd thing arrived in my inbox March 2022, or June, pick one. And the first record I have of discussion procrastination with myself was June 2021.
But that can’t be right, let’s take another look. Well, the first time I tried to write down some order to my life, well earliest date I can find on the computer is 2016 but I’m sure it was even earlier than that, but I’m not totally crazy, so I’ll stop looking and accept 2016 as the first date I can write here that I’m sure isn’t a fib.
So, I have been working to sort procrastination all my life, but definitely since 2016, getting upset with myself, angry, all that. I mean, so even with all that work in place, everything I’ve learned, here I am again. Maybe, just maybe, what I’ve been missing is something that tells me IT’S ALL RIGHT, what’s the worst that can happen? Maybe, just maybe, a bit of procrastination can help eh?
And so it has. Today. And not just getting this blog post started, more than that, the time I’ve spent letting The Thing mull about in my brain, well it made me look at it differently, properly internalise that yes, actually, once it’s done that heavy weight will really be gone and I’ll feel better. And that it would be a good thing to count the time the task actually really takes so next time it appears as the next thing I need to do, I won’t be telling myself it takes weeks to do, or just 10 minutes, I’ll have some idea what the truth is.
So, off I go to the heading in my: Headstuff_ProcrastinationAndSuch mindmap (created June 2021) I’ll find this fix, today’s fix, and it might make all the difference eh?
It says: Procrastination | Accept it’s a part of you and you might as well get the most out of it eh?
Two Days Later
Here we bleedin’ go again. And I thought I had a handle on this procrastination malarkey.
Just don’t wanna. Don’t wanna do ANYTHING in fact.
Sorry to sound all stuck record here, but I wandered over to Adhd Partner AI, see if she can think of anything that might get me doing rather than sitting staring at stuff while in a state of: “You could send me to the prettiest holiday destination in the universe, and I still wouldn’t want to be there.”
Well, it wasn’t her idea, it was mine, but the talking to her helped. I’m looking at all this wrong! I’m calling it “boring accounts stuff” in my brain, and that’s enough to put anyone off eh? Perhaps what I should be doing is thinking of the kind of thing that floats my boaty instead of the stuff that gets my boat all chomped by an orca eh?
Perhaps it’s the list itself, the project itself, that I should be allowing into my brain instead? Like in that list there will be smiley face emojis, stuff that needs to be fixed (and I do like fixing stuff), checklists (and I do like checking stuff off), experiments (let’s try it this way, see if it works better), and efficiency (we are The Borg, we like to do things efficiently).
And hey ho, that worked a treat. They call it “re-framing” I think. And I do like a nice frame on a picture.
Footnotes
Blue House
When we went out in the car with my dad when we were children, if we got lost Dad would say: “We need to go back to the Blue House roundabout and start again.” The Blue House is a famous house in Newcastle upon Tyne and there’s a big roundabout right next to it. So, essentially Blue House means, start again from the beginning.
My Simples Mindmap Nodes
There’s a Storm! It’s a Heavy Weight on my spirit.
So I go to my Fixes, which Rule Them All, and will help me and Fix this. I am a Ninja.
Words About ADHD 