I’m Not New to Procrastination

It has been a fixture in my life ever since I can remember. I procrastinated doing homework in school, procrastinated doing assignments in college, and still, to this day, I procrastinate paying bills and filing important paperwork. The only difference is that the stakes today are much higher.

Procrastination is a symptom of being unable to handle negative emotions associated with the work at hand.

I perceived homework as a waste of time. Not because I didn’t want to do the work, but because homework in the Indian education system for most subjects consists of merely filling in your notebook with readymade answers from study guides. So, for us, it was no more than a handwriting exercise.

Moreover, the homework wasn’t graded, and all your marks were decided by the final exam right before the end of the school year. On the contrary, I enjoyed doing math and physics homework, as well as project-based homework, because it consisted of real problems that didn’t have cookie-cutter solutions.

The other kind of work I procrastinate on is bureaucratic. If I need to visit a government office and stand in line to submit paperwork, you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m going to drag it as long as possible until I absolutely need to. I’m sure most people relate to me on this kind of procrastination because no one enjoys wasting their time waiting on other people to move it along.

But there is a new kind of procrastination in my life that is bothering me to no end now that I’m a grown-up engaged in several creative pursuits.

The Kind of Procrastination That Stems from Uncertainty

I have developed over 20 games, some released, some prototyped, and written two novellas thus far. For each of these projects, I procrastinated for a reason that I had never faced growing up.

The fear of a lack of reward for the effort. The fear of ridicule. The fear of backing the wrong horse.

Let me explain.

When I had to do homework, I had to do homework, or else the teacher would scold me in front of the whole class.

When I need to update my KYC in the bank, I need to update my KYC in the bank, or it might freeze my account.

Basically, in many cases, we don’t have a choice in the matter of whether the work has to get done or not. These are tasks that you just have to do. This gives you a deadline to meet because your career, life, or loved one’s well-being depends on it.

However, when you start a creative project, there is no such deadline unless you set it for yourself. It is, in fact, a burden that you are choosing for yourself. It is a poison that you picked willingly when you could have been doing something less mentally taxing like watching Netflix or scrolling through Instagram.

Procrastinating on a goal that you have chosen for yourself rather than something that other people are enforcing on you is a much harder problem to face. Everybody has 99 problems and starting a creative project can sometimes feel like increasing that count to 100 when no one asked you to do it.

That is why most people give up on their gym schedule after some time. Because they are failing to meet a nebulous goal that they set for themselves, without a deadline or a plan of action. This is compounded in a creative project where you may be forced to throw away a lot of the progress you made in the journey, like unused code in software or words in a novel.

It is the same reason why people get farther on a project with an accountability partner rather than just by themselves. To continue the gym example, you are more likely to stick to your workout regimen if you have booked a private trainer to keep you on schedule and make sure you don’t miss your appointments.

This also brings up a discussion about internal and external motivation. I am not sure which one is definitively stronger. It varies for different kinds of tasks. Having an internal motivation is generally better but an external one can also kick us into high gear when the time is right. This is where those who work best under pressure thrive.

There is also a difference between the creative work we do for leisure and the creative work that we do to pay our bills. With the former, the motivation to work is internal since we enjoy doing the task for the sake of the task itself, rather than chasing external validation. Creative work as a job can get taxing as it is difficult to force creativity for many when you are staring down a deadline.

How Do We Overcome Our Unique Procrastination?

The key lesson I can share is to be aware of where your motivation lies.

We should identify whether the motivation is internal or external and then pick the stronger one.

In my mother tongue, Marathi, there is a wonderful phrase that my mother always uses to remind me of the kind of problems I often get myself into — विकतचं दुखणं

It translates to “pain that you have paid for”

If you are unsure about whether the independent work you are doing will get the result you desire or is just too difficult, you are bound to give up faster than if you had to do it for an external commitment.

We like the idea of having finished a project but very few people thoroughly enjoy the actual process of getting to the finish line. And those are the only ones who succeed.

So, the next time you are working on something that you want to do but doesn’t need to be done, ask yourself this — do I enjoy doing this or just the idea of having done this?