Overcoming Procrastination
Today we are going to talk about completing those large projects that are just hanging over our heads. We all have them from time to time.
How often have you procrastinated on something that you just didn’t want to do, and it was sitting in the back of your mind making you nuts — because, you knew that you needed to complete the project.
I was so busy just working on the business of business over the last year needing to get the practice and retreats going for when I leave here — and that is all a lot of work. I can’t tell you how many webinars and courses I have taken to learn how to do this stuff and still — it is hard to do when the tech changes every 10 seconds, and I am not a tech person. I have had several people teach me how to find folks and all — and still, it is hard to do. I believe that some people are just natural marketers — they love doing the writing and figuring out the stats — and I am not one of them, unfortunately. However, that isn’t the project that needs to get done ASAP at this particular time.
In my case, I have to complete my graduation paper. I haven’t worked on it in a long while except when I came across some resources that I just listed in the resource list to go to later when I was going to sit down and just get the thing done. Because this is the one thing I do know about myself — when I put my mind to getting something done I get it done with the deadline met. In this case, I had to give myself my own deadline and that was for tomorrow — but the paper is written and all I need to do is put it through Grammarly given my lousy grammar and spelling — and then send it off to the professor via email. The Grammerly review will take a long time though because it is 30 pages that need to be edited!
Now, this is the thing about large projects — they can feel overwhelming. The funny thing about this particular project was that I believed that I had much more written than I did when I went back to it 12 days ago. I thought I had 10 pages written and I really had about 5 pages written because of the material that I had found, but ended up not using.
So, I had 25 pages to write with all the resources involved when I picked it up again — all academic journal articles as this is an academic paper.
Now, this is the thing that was hard to understand: I got to the point where I only needed 6 pages and I figured I could get that done in about a day. No, not at all. It took me three full days of work to develop the material needed to write those last 6 pages.
The thing about this particular paper and the saving grace to being able to sit for that amount of hours was being interested in the subject matter — I chose it so there was no reason for me not to be interested in it- because the worst is when one has a specific paper to write and the subject matter is utterly uninteresting and then it needs to be done in a certain format that makes zero sense and is hard to figure out. That was my literary review for my first master’s graduation project. I called the tutoring people 3 times before I had any idea what I needed to do for that thing. It came in handy though for the literary review that I needed to do for my research methods paper.
The best thing about getting these large projects done is to have them done!
So, what projects are you procrastinating on — making it a larger deal than it need be? Because the reality of the situation is that things will not get themselves done — we have to apply ourselves to them and then when they are completed we can breathe a whole lot easier.
If you feel stuck getting something done that needs to be done, contact me and we will set up a time for us to see what we can do to help you out. Because life is so much easier when we aren’t feeling dragged down, doesn’t it?
Contact me at: dawningvisions.com/contact_suzanne/
