The Curse of the Procrastinator

In keeping with last week's theme of "bad habits that are holding me back in life," I need to talk about the productivity killer that is...procrastination.

 

When I have a specific, defined, tangible deliverable to hand off to someone, I almost never procrastinate. I'm the girl sitting next to you in class who can't commiserate about the 10 page paper you have due tomorrow because I already finished it. Sorry! I'm going out drinking tonight and you're not, neener neener.

 

It's the intangible things - the deadlines that don't come with hard specifications - where I'm terrible.

 

Let's say I had an exam in school, or even in life right now let's say I have a job interview (I don't have any coming up, grumble perpetual unemployment grumble). Both of those events are things you should prepare for, and things for which you probably can never do enough preparation. If there's time left, you should study.

 

When it comes to things like that, I like to wait and wait and wait until I have the bare minimum amount of time left to still be reasonably competent/knowledgeable/productive. And then, aha! I only have to put in a teeny bit of effort because HEY SORRY that's all the time I have.

 

Remember last week when i called myself a "lazy sack of crap?" Yup, still true.

 

Sometimes the "bare minimum" is still a lot of time. All the time in the world wouldn't have been enough for me to be awesome at accounting, so I studied my ass off for that final in business school and in fact stayed in during a weekend-long pub crawl that many of my classmates were on (if you know me, you know how big a deal it is for me to willingly miss a pub crawl). So it's not like I was a completely terrible student. I was actually really proud of my 3.6 GPA (it's my blog and I'll brag if I want to!).

 

After job interviews, my second favorite area to procrastinate in is going to the gym. On most weekend days, I'll wake up, check email/Facebook/whatever, maybe catch up on a few TV shows, and then figure out how long I have until I have to be at whatever plans I have for the day. I'll then work backwards, figuring out what time I should leave the house, then what time I need to get home from the gym in order to shower and be ready on time, and then what time I need to leave the gym. Then I'll figure out how much time I would have at the gym if I got ready and left right at that moment. Sometimes I'll be like, "Oh shit I can only work out for 30 minutes, better go now!" and I'll throw on my sneakers and head out the door. Other times I'll realize I have 3 hours, at which point I'll sit around and apply to some jobs or watch more TV until I have less time. Like...30 minutes.

 

Why do I do this to myself? It's ridiculous to work out for 30 minutes when I easily could have worked out for an hour, and it's even more ridiculous to spend 10 minutes doing company research in advance of an interview when I really SHOULD have spent much longer. It's a weird form of institutionalized self-sabotage that is borne of nothing but my [thankfully only occasional] reluctance to really TRY that hard at anything. I'm only hurting myself here, but that's kind of the point. I'M HURTING MYSELF.

 

After blogging over at Stratejoy for 5 months and giving myself a healthy dose of self-love, I've moved out of the phase of my quarterlife crisis where I figure out what the fuck is wrong with me and WHAT IS GOING ON IN MY HEAD ACK.

 

The problem here is that I'm now in the part of the QLC where I need to make changes AKA The Part With All the Hard Work. Blarg.

 

And so I'm trying to take Molly's advice from the Fierce Love course and implement some systems to try and change the bad habits. I've started blocking out time for the gym on my Google calendar, and even though I can (and often do) ignore it, sometimes that reminder goes off and I grump around my room as I put on my gym clothes and then, my bad attitude be damned, I go to the gym. And maybe I'll still only stay for 30 minutes sometimes because I'm tired/crampy/other excuse, but other times I tough it out for longer. And lo and behold, I always feel awesome afterward.

 

At the beginning of this year, I thought that transitioning from being an unhappy person to a happy one would have been the hardest part of this whole journey. But now that I AM happier, I realize just how much work I still have left. My attitude has vastly improved since the beginning of my QLC, but it's time to take that new attitude and use it to make some positive changes in my life. But, like everything, it's a matter of taking it one step at a time. Today, the gym. Tomorrow...the world.

 

 

**This is my new series called Stratejoy Monday. To learn more about all this goodness, see the first 5 months of my Stratejoy journey here. 

Famous lookalikes and my love of JGL

One of the best parts of summer, right up there with street fairs, sundresses & flip flops, and trips to the Frying Pan, are outdoor concerts.

In the last week alone I have been to 3 summer concerts: Cake, Blues Traveler/Barenaked Ladies, and Incubus/Linkin Park. It was a week of high school throwback shows and I never thought I would say this but I'm a little concert-ed out right now.

But this post isn't about that. This post is about a revelation I had during the Linkin Park show.

This is Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park's primary songwriter, guitarist, keyboardist, and rapper (as opposed to Chester Bennington, the guy who does all the screaming. I wrote about him in my post about how rock stars are too skinny).

This is Josh Radnor, AKA the guy who plays Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother.

Let's look at them together.

These guys are TWINSIES.

If you like Linkin Park and you like How I Met Your Mother, you can probably understand how distracting it is to go through the entire concert feeling like Ted Mosby is rapping at you. But still - GOOD CONCERT.

Also, I think Mike Shinoda is adorable (Josh Radnor too, obviously). He's half Japanese, and I was going to say something about how maybe I have a thing for half-Asian men because of how much I absolutely adore Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but then I googled it and apparently JGL is very much white and not at all Asian.

Was I the only person who thought this? Anyway, JGL is Jewish, which I probably should have guessed with a last name like Levitt. The only thing this can possibly mean is that SOMEONE PLEASE GIVE HIM MY PHONE NUMBER IMMEDIATELY.

JGL, my mom and grandma will love you! Let's get married.

See? We'd be a totally cute couple.

When Motivation is MIA

Like anyone else, I have a few things I don't like about myself (sometimes it's more than few things, you know how it is).

One of the traits I really wish I didn't have is the fact that I'm a lazy sack of crap. Well, sort of. I'm really good about waking up at ungodly hours to go to the gym, and I will frequently leave Brooklyn to trek into Manhattan when a lesser woman might succumb to the siren song of sweatpants and Netflix.

What I'm trying to say, really, is that I'm straight up terrible at learning new skills. I have zero patience for being bad at things and zero desire to work hard to achieve something when the initial stages of getting towards that goal are boring.

Let me give you two examples. Let's say I wanted to get better at photography (I don't, FYI. There's no need to work on photography skills when the only pictures you take are of the variety where you stick your arm out and take a picture of yourself while wasted with your girls at a bar). I could take classes or read stuff or ask a camera-savvy friend for help, and I'd hopefully get better and enjoy the process along the way. The reason why I would enjoy it is because, even if the pictures I took were god awful, I'd still be taking pictures.

As a second example, let's say I wanted to learn to play the guitar, which I did when I was 19. I spent a fair amount of time teaching myself what I could learn from the internet and eventually graduated to actual lessons. 6 months into it, I quit. Why? Because unlike photography and the shitty starter photos, the beginning stages of learning the guitar don't really involve a whole lot of playing the guitar, and what I really wanted out of it was to be good enough to play a ton of songs or jam with other people and all I was doing was taking too long to switch between chords while trying to keep up with Weezer's Island in the Sun.

I know a lot of people who love the thrill of watching their own progress with a new skill, and I am both jealous of and mystified by those people. Improvement is wonderful, but I have an extremely short attention span and I lose interest in things at the point when the novelty wears off yet I realize how many more hours of work I need to put in in order to be even mildly successful.

I don't mind practicing basic skills in volleyball, because I've been playing for 15 years and while I have tons of room for improvement, I'm good enough to play RIGHT NOW. Yet I know I will probably never take up karate, something I would love to do and that my dad has been saying for years that I would be great at (and he would know - he has a black belt, as does my brother), because all I want to do is break boards and I'm pretty sure they don't let you do that when you're a white belt.

This is why I relish the opportunities that involve being externally motivated, particularly ones that involve specific timelines. Schooling of any kind is a great way to force myself to build up new skills. I'm pretty sure that if someone had just given me a math textbook when I was younger and expected me to do some self-directed learning, I still wouldn't know what 2 plus 2 is. Even when I took bartending classes 3 years ago - I learned how to make all sorts of fancy drinks (all of which I have sadly forgotten) because I HAD TO. Would I have ever taught myself to make a ton of different martinis? Absolutely not.

I don't know how to change this about myself, but I want to. I feel like I'm missing out on so many interests or hobbies that I might enjoy but that I'm too lazy to even think about getting started on because I know how bored I'm going to get. And the thought of how good I'd be at the guitar or karate or anything else if I had just found the motivation to FUCKING DO IT ALREADY just makes me all sorts of sad. Yet I'm doing absolutely nothing to change that.

I suppose there's the option of finding a way to create some sort of external push to learn things, but I can't afford to take classes or lessons for every little thing that I might want to do. And besides, learning to motivate yourself is probably something I should figure out sooner rather than later.

So what do I do here? Do I find a way to become less lazy, or do I just stick to things that, like photography, I can be productive at even while being bad at them? Because it's really the lack of accomplishing anything that drives me away.

Suggestions welcome!


This is my new series called Stratejoy Monday. To learn more about all this goodness, see the first 5 months of my Stratejoy journey here.