Procrastination...

http://jamesclear.com/how-to-stop-procrastinating

I read the above article on how to stop procrastinating today and the irony is that it's been open in a tab in my browser for over a week.  I can't even remember how I found it.  It was linked in some other article that I read a while back, I think.  Anyway, the writer talks about the 2-minute rule, which means basically that if you can do something in 2 minutes, do it now.

It's something that I've kind of said before, in so many words.  I blogged ages ago about how I used to lament never getting anything done because part of me didn't want to start any tasks (be they related to music, voice over, or just general networking stuff) unless I had a good two hours to devote to them.  Two's just an arbitrary number really.  Any amount of time that I deemed not long enough to work on those important tasks would be shrugged off or delineated to chores that I actually could finish.  I used to nap. Ha!

But, I actually realized that if I could at least start the tasks in my hand, the next time I returned to them they would be partially started or maybe even partially finished.  In this way I could chip away at them instead of being married to the idea of always making huge strides each time I sat down to work.  More importantly, and this is something the article above doesn't specifically mention, I could potentially find (and this happened more often than you'd think) that the task that was looming was a lot simpler than I had originally imagined and that completion of said task would not turn out to be such a colossal undertaking.

The article actually mentions that this applies to starting new habits as well.  Without even realizing it, probably because if you think about it, this is pretty intuitive, I was applying this in many areas of my life over the past few years.

When I was saving up to move to NYC, 5 years ago, and trying to stay fit and keep my mind centered on my goal, I decided that my fitness was key in this endeavor.  One morning in the early summer of 2008, when I had just started taking care of my sister's dog Nigel, I decided I would take him for his morning walk as soon as I woke up and that it would become my jogging routine.  Part of what made it work so well, is that the dog made me run with the leash so it just made sense to put on jogging clothes every time I took him out and, also, that I did it in the morning before I had time to think about anything else or to get started on something that would eat up my time.  The last thing that probably contributed most to starting this habit was already having a routine that was the same almost every day of the week (working overnights 8pm - 4am during the week, sleeping until midnight and waking up refreshed and working on music all afternoon).  At any rate, just diving into it every morning and going outside to jog with the dog suddenly became a routine.  I don't think I skipped it once that summer.  Even after the dog was shipped off to be with them in Okinawa I kept up the jogging.

"Once you start doing something, it’s easier to continue doing it."

I have found this time and again with everything I attempt that's difficult (or perceived as difficult), if I just do it, I realize that it's a lot easier than you thought it was.  Not that I ever wanted to procrastinate when planning my move to NYC, but this mentality certainly helped along that endeavor.  Also, every piece of music I've ever written started this way.

Anyway, I've been faced with the opportunity to procrastinate and even nap in the past few days and I avoided the temptation by simply starting something else.  Today, I plugged away at the piano piece instead of napping...luckily, I was working on my laptop so I didn't even have to remove myself from the bed...and also, luckily, the piano is not that far of a walk from my bed...it's practically right next to it...did I mention that I love my apartment?  I also managed to go shopping and cook some food for the next work week when I could have just lazed around watching TV.

Don't worry, I did actually relax a little bit today so I'm not overworking myself either.  Now I have a phone call to make, yoga and a date tonight!  The moral of this story is to get off your asses and do something even if you think it's too big of an undertaking.