Five Tips for Beating Procrastination

I know, I know, it's a total writer's cliche, but I procrastinated when I really should have been writing this SharePost. I played Lord of the Rings Online for half an hour, using the excuse that since my son and husband were watching tv, I wouldn't be able to concentrate anyway. When the tv went off, I stared at the screen for thirty seconds, and then remembered that I really needed to put a load of laundry in. Granted, I really did need to do laundry, but for some reason that didn't occur to me when I was playing LOTRO.

It's amazing how when you're procrastinating, all of a sudden the other things that you've been putting off get prioritized really high. "I can't believe that I haven't gotten around to mixing the coyote urine," I said to myself virtuously a few minutes ago. (Yes, I said coyote urine. If you live somewhere that we do, where deer get really hungry in the summer due to lack of rain and you happen to have some tasty plants, you probably know what I mean. The only thing I've found that works is coyote urine. The deer think that a coyote's marked the territory, so they leave it alone.)

But you have to spray a perimeter around the plants and make a kind of virtual fence with it to block any entrances to your yard and okay, what do you think it smells like? It's horrible. Spraying it is no fun, and mixing it up is not a real joy either. So this is normally not one of the chores that seems really appealing. But if mixing up a fragrant batch of coyote pee sounds appealing, what about things like watching tv or even just staring into space? They're like a 500lb magnet that you're irresistibly drawn to before you even realize what you're doing.

Most people tend to procrastinate, unless they're those really perfect souls that the rest of us love to hate. When you moan about how you haven't gotten anywhere with your project/school paper, etc., they'll look at you in surprise and say, "Really? I was done a week ago." Thankfully, they're the exception instead of the rule, or there would probably be a lot more homicides.

But for people with Attention Deficit Disorder, getting something done can be really tough. Not only do we have the same tendency as other people to put off doing something that's not thoroughly entertaining, but we have an extra hurdle - our distractability. After I had written the first few sentences of this SharePost, my eye fell on the XBox Live card on my desk that I had been meaning to add to my son's account. "Hey, you want me to upgrade your account to Gold for a month?" You can imagine what his response was, and ten minutes later I finally got back to work.

Of course, for many of us, there is something positive about ADD/ADHD that can help us get things done - we work best under pressure. We find it easier to focus and might even get into what's called hyper-focusing.

But after one too many all-nighters in college (one night I wrote four papers), I decided that I didn't really enjoy working under pressure, even if my mind performed better that way. And yes, an awful lot of tasks that I had been putting off got done while I was putting off the chore I was supposed to be doing, but is that any way to prioritize? Not really. I was tired of always having things hanging over my head and ruining my day.