I’ll get to that but I’m procrastinating first. What if procrastination is part of the process?
We’ve all been there. We find every other thing that seems worth doing before doing the thing we really know we need and/or want to do. In some cases we run out of time to even get around to what we really wanted and needed to do.
When that happens what is it like?
Even if we don’t do the thing we wanted and even if we know we’ve got in our own way it can still be difficult to overcome the fact that we are procrastinating.
And procrastination can sometimes beget procrastination as we don’t achieve what we want and the inevitable negative impacts can make it even harder to do the thing we wanted to do. We become procrastinators and in becoming that we perpetuate it further.
What if we reframed procrastination as part of the process?
What if the first step in doing something was actually procrastination or distraction or avoidance?
The idea of ‘Flow’ as a state of immersion that leads to a deep feeling of productivity is a well-researched and popular idea that many strive for. If we can achieve a state of flow then we have broken past the procrastination, we have more than started, now we’re really making headway.
Yet in his research on Flow Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, highlights that it is a four stage process, of which the first stage is Struggle.
The others are: Release, Flow, Recovery, in that order.
Therefore what if procrastination is part of this process?
If it is, what could procrastination be telling us?
It could be that getting into the Flow state we want in order to get on with what we want is difficult and that in procrastination we are in fact in the process of struggle.
Or, perhaps we actually need to Recover from the last period of flow.
If we embraced the procrastination as part of the process of doing what we wanted what could be the impact?
Perhaps we’ll expend less energy trying to push aside distraction and actually be priming our focus for the task at hand that we want to do.
What would our opinion of ourselves as procrastinators be if we saw it as part of the process? What could the impact there be?
This isn’t to say that we must procrastinate, nor if it is a good or bad thing, really we’re asking two questions
What may procrastination be telling us?
Knowing what it tells me, what does that mean for what I really want to do?
In short, how may our relationship to procrastination impact how we do what we really want to do?
Perhaps this is really about understanding how we work, what our resistances are and in knowing these things working with them to achieve what we want. In transforming resistance into acceptance we can surely act how we really want to.
As Jung said “what you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.”
So what is your relationship to procrastination?
What would it be like to accept and work with how we are?
If we all went about what we wanted in life with an approach of acceptance at how we do things, that harnesses our unique approaches, what would it be like?
