Have you ever had a craving for, say, chocolate chip cookies, thinking it would be pretty easy to make a batch, only to find that there isn’t enough flour, the eggs in the carton are past their expiration date, and the pantry is void of chocolate chips? This is what I think of when I recognize procrastination. Not the cookies, per se, but that the ingredients needed aren’t readily available (or that there are obstacles in keep us from moving forward).
The cure for procrastination is to dig for the reason why we put off doing something, so we can address the real issue that stands in the way, thus dissolving the procrastination. As with lots of things, easier to understand than to implement.
I worked a little this week on separating the 48 education blog posts into four piles (these piles will be “chapters”). One stack was three times the blog posts of each of the other stacks. As I skimmed the posts, I realized some may not be viable for this book. A few had similar titles. Because these posts were written a while ago, the topic on a couple of them were related to the pandemic. Besides tweaking them so that they don’t read as a blog post, some of them may require quite a bit of a rewrite. Hence the procrastination.
I wanted to start back into book publishing with this project because I believed (mistakenly?) that it would be an easy project, not a lot of friction to get it into print. At first glance, I think it will need more work than I planned. I’m not afraid of the work (procrastination often has its roots in fear). There is no bar of success I have that this book must reach. So why have I been reluctant to get out a pencil and start editing the hard copy? (A rhetorical question that will require a bit of reflection.) Once I do that, I can verify the stack (chapter) the post is in, weed out the posts that won’t work, and have clarity on the project. Clarity can (perhaps) wipe away the procrastination.
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