Thursday, October 23, 2008

Procrastination Happens - Now Make the Most of It

Turn off Charmed and unplug the television. Tell yourself that right now - this minute - you're going to research your next batch of articles.

Somewhere between reading Setting the Right Priorities and Don't Throw the Baby Out With the Bath Water, stumble upon an intriguing article about The Ten Unhealthiest "Healthy" Foods. It has nothing to do with your research. But then again, neither does the next link to What Does 100 Calories Look Like? Follow the link anyways, and tell yourself you'll get back to Priorities after this article.

Eight hours and 30 nutritional articles later, feel guilty that you haven't done any research about priortizing yet. Guilt-trip yourself: your husband is working all day, and what are you doing? Threaten yourself: you won't make money unless you research and write those articles.

Proceed to spend another day copying and pasting nutrition information into neat files on your computer. At the end of the second day, bribe yourself: if you spend the next two days researching Prioritization, you can go buy that humongous, shiny new slow cooker this weekend. Think: if this self-bribery works, you can use it in your article about prioritization. Start mentally listing the nutritional meals you'll be able to make with the slow cooker.

On day three, as you're checking out the USDA nutritional chart, think how great it would be if you had the time to learn more about this.

Stop reading.

Fight the urges to kick yourself for stupidity and bounce up and down with happiness at the same time. Decide it's time for a change in your research topic.

Recognize that you won't procrastinate if you're researching nutrition. It's fun! It's interesting! Decide that the next time you procrastinate, you'll take a close look at what you're using to procrastinate, and see if it can be used as your next research topic.

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