31Ways2GetItStarted™!: January 7, 2013

Day 7: Do One Thing Today to Make Tomorrow Easier

AKA start cultivating healthy habits. I write this as a someone who has really made an art form of procrasturbation. Interestingly enough, a habit I started in law school. (#surprisesurprise) Ahh law school: wherein, if you have a paper due at 9am Monday morning...why would you get started before midnight or even 1am? Where's your love of adventure? First of all, you have to catch up on DListed.com; what your friends are posting on Facebook; the apartment needs to be vacuumed... oh there's a ton of sh*t to do whenever a legal writing assignment is due! Eventually, it's 8:52am and you're calculating how long you need to print and drive furiously to the law school, depositing the paper on your prof's desk at 09:01. Smirking. Ahh, good times. #notreally

Of course, in college, when I studied subjects I was actually you know, interested in, I was the kind of nerd who would turn in papers weeks earlier than requested. (I suspect that if I had done that in law school, the professor would have thrown it back at me with a disdainful grunt for actually making him work, when he really wanted to be giving interviews on public radio...or blogging. Not that I'm at all implying that law professors are hideously overpaid for the small amount of work they do. No, not at all.)

Now, as my own boss, I get to do a lot of stuff I love (coaching), and many things I dislike (too many to list), but invariably, when I ignore my own to-do lists, they, also invariably, keep growing till eventually it's 3am and I realize that I'm under the proverbial gun. On the other hand, when I force myself to suck it up and do today the irritating things I wrote in today's to-do list...usually they're not as horrible as I anticipated, and afterwards I feel less guilty and the next day is a lot easier. "Usually."

Thus, on Day #7, my hint to you is to continue working on cultivating health habits and do one thing today which will make tomorrow easier. Whether it's going to the gym, or returning an irritating phone-call, or working on your resume: do it, get it over with and make your life easier. Because the more you do today, the more you'll feel able to do tomorrow. Conversely, the harder you make tomorrow, the harder you'll feel it to be and then forget it. That thinking leads nowhere fast. Eventually you'll be holed up in an underground bunker waiting for the end of the world...but hey, you still won't be a law professor, trying to pretend that learning civil procedure is valuable, so things aren't all bad!

Want some help figuring out which one thing to do today? (I've actively deleted any and all knowledge of civ pro from my brain, so please, don't even bother.) Email me @carlotazee@gmail.com! And feel free to leave any rants, comments, praise in the comments section!

Creativity Coaching Hint #1

Procrastination is a form of fear, so confront the thing you've been putting off, and just get it over with!

I write this as a master procrastinator. A skill I truly became proficient at while in law school. Here's an excellent example of how I would procrastinate: let's say, my legal writing prof assigned me two weeks to write a soul-crushingly boring research exercise about Title IX issues in women's sports. Or land rights for the indigenous peoples of Alaska. Or some other subject which makes me want to start drinking right now just thinking about it.

Two weeks! Two weeks is an eternity! In reality, I have 13 gloriously care-free days to avoid even reading the assignment, until it's about 10pm the night before the paper's due. Now: the magic begins. Now, I shall be up all night, cursing and writing till the last possible minute. Which means that if class is at 9am, I'll be printing the finished paper at 8:55am, and speeding like a maniac through town, as ahead of me some idiot in a Hummer with a John Birch Society bumper sticker goes extra s-l-o-w. Good times.

Now, being self-employed, I can't do that. Procrastination is a form of self-sabotage, if you want to get all Soviet about it. Now, I'm forced to do the thing I dread immediately, in order to get it out of the way, so my to-do list doesn't end up reading like Sophie's Choice. And here's, of course, what always happens: I do the thing I've been dreading and it's...not that horrendous. (*shifty eyes*) There's a lesson here, if we knew of a talented creativity yenta to teach it...