Procrastination is my own personal worst enemy. I don’t know what other people’s experience with procrastination is, if it’s a problem that plagues creative people in particular or if everyone gets it, but it drives me completely crazy.
Yesterday, for example, I was planning on going for a run. Just putting on my shoes and stepping out the door would have been too easy though, so I managed to plan out three different routes on MapMyRun, replace both of my shoes, and fiddle with my ipod for a grand total of 20 minutes wasted. At that point I realized that if I had just started the silly run in the first place I would have been half done by then.
But fear not, there is a cure for procrastination. I have discovered it, named it, and I’m going to share it here with you now. Are you ready? I call it the ‘Five Minute Running Start’, and it’s dead easy.
The steps for the Five Minute Running Start look like this:
- Step one: Start. Whether you’re writing, running, gardening, crocheting, it doesn’t matter, you just start doing. Turn off the brain, stop thinking, and start doing.
- Step two: Keep going for five minutes.
And that’s it, that’s all there is to it.
The Five Minute Running Start works on the theory of flow. When we do an activity, whatever it is, we often get in to a state of flow where we’re focused, concentrating, and completely immersed in the thing we’re doing. It’s that intense kind of focus that we’ve all experienced where you can lose track of time and then ‘wake up’ hours later, hungry and absolutely sure that someone has been messing with your clocks, because there’s no way 3 hours have gone by.
When you get to that state of concentration, things like work, exercise, or whatever else you’re doing feel effortless. The tricky part, I always find, is getting to that state of flow. That’s where the Five Minute Running Start comes in.
What you’re doing is delaying the procrastination. You tell yourself that you can go right back to procrastinating after the five minutes are up. But chances are you’ll never even realize that five minutes have elapsed, because you’ve forgotten all about the five minutes and are cruising along, completely absorbed in what you’re doing.
And that is the Five Minute Running Start method.
Photo Credit – Darren Hester
{ 1 trackback }
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
My God, you’ve described to a “T” the everyday struggle I have… fighting with myself to get in a groove to produce compelling copy, insightful edits and magnificent magazines.