Attacked By Monkeys: Post #15 on Procrastination

I had an awesome week… two weeks ago.  The deadline loomed, the pressure was on, and I performed.  I made a month’s worth of income in a week, and good thing too, as I had pretty much pissed away the preceeding 3 weeks.  The week after that was another total write-off, I did almost nothing besides attend a meeting and answer my email.

How can I follow a star-performer week with a useless-johnny week?  Why, after I shake off the procrastination monkey, is it so easy for him to climb back on?

For a while now I’ve been performing well.  The work was new and exciting.  But now it’s all so last-month.  It’s time to bring back some tried-and-true procrastination-beating tactics, and to try out some new ones.  

My Biggest Fan

Two day seminar hosted by the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA):  $420.

Notepad and pen with CanWEA logo:  Free with admission.

The support of my biggest fan:  PRICELESS.

The Great Game

Today I was working on one of the exercises in The Pathfinder when a realization seized my brain, halting all other thought.  I shimmered with epiphany and marveled at its obviousness.  That simple idea, I have heard or seen expressed a hundred times before.  You have too.  But something about the way the author conveyed it this time spoke directly to my inner workings.

What game am I playing?

Imagine you’re playing a boardgame.  Why exactly are you rolling dice, collecting tokens and moving your piece around the board?  Not because dice or pieces or boards are much fun, but to achieve a certain OBJECTIVE set out in the RULES.  In order to win, you need to reach a certain space on the board, or collect a set of tokens, or the most tokens, or whatever the case may be.  As the game progresses, you make decisions every turn that you hope will take you closer to achieving the game’s objectives.

Now imagine that you made up the rules of the game yourself, and you set the objectives to be striven for.  To put it another way, the game is your life.  Every day, you make decisions that will take you closer to achieving your own objectives.  What are those objectives which you have set for yourself, and by what rules do you choose to play?

Nowtopia

It’s nice when you hear other people express exactly what you yourself are feeling.  It lets you know that you’re not crazy.

On Friday, the great ethical leader Dr. David Suzuki hosted The Current, the late-morning radio program on CBC Radio 1.  The program is still available for streaming on cbc.ca.

One of the guests introduces the idea of a ‘Nowtopian’, being a person like a freeware programmer or vacant-lot gardener who spends some leisure hours sharing their skills within their community, not to earn money but as:

“…a practical act, to improve life in the here and now.  It involves finding that they have things to do that they can’t do in the context of what they get paid to do.  So it comes out of this bifurcated life that most of us have had to endure all these years, where we have something that we do for money, a job that we learn – most of us have some sort of college or highschool education that leads us into the work-a-day world – and the work-a-day world has been so degraded for so long, that our desire for an artisanal or craft-like relationship to our work is just impossible to satisfy in the wage-labour scenario.  And usually the things we really care about are the things we can’t get paid to do.”