I’m fairly sure most people have to work to achieve balance between Motivation and Procrastination, but I’m finding anything approaching balance is fairly distant. I’m motivated to get motivated, but when the time comes I just end up procrastinating…

Chip in from Kim: As Garfield says, “My get up and go got up and went.”

In my more ironic (or moronic) procrastinations, I spend my time imagining what I could achieve were I not sitting around procrastinating! (Kim: That’s just daydreaming, and daydreaming is different.)

Intellectually I understand some of the thought processes that must be operating inside me, yet seem unable (or unwilling) to actually accept them and make the necessary changes to overcome them.

For those “Gentle Readers” who don’t really care to know more about what makes me tick, don’t bother to read on. 🙂 (I have just wasted another 15 minutes trying to locate the origin on the term “Gentle Readers”…)

The most obvious and trendy condition that seems to affect me is my Comfort Zone and unwillingness to venture outside it. It’s such a handy term that can be applied to many aspects of my procrastination and I’ll try and list some here now (Probably more for my benefit than yours).

Social Events: Like most humans, I enjoy social events; mixing with other humans male & female makes the world go round. This is probably the most common use of the Comfort Zone terminology because it’s the most apparent and applicable to people – it’s when we feel the most discomfort. Like my father, I tend to shun social events.

Personal/Body Image: Naturally this has plenty to do with self esteem and the connections are again fairly obvious. Many people tell me that exercise is the only way to sustainably improve my body, personal image, and general self esteem, and I typically agree with them. The trap is that everyone (including myself unfortunately) has plenty of disparaging remarks to make about obese people exercising in public, which lowers self esteem further and basically prevents them from trying it again soon. This explains the excess of late night info-mercials for poorly marketed “at-home weight-loss” gimmicks.

Hobbies or other “creative” endeavours: I find this slightly more obscure but it’s probably just me trying to justify why I do the things I do. It’s far easier for me to pursue hobbies that I’m more likely to succeed at – basically anything to do with computers, electronics, or technology in general. Something that’s further out of my areas of expertise (e.g. gardening for food and asthetics) often gets neglected, primarily because if I don’t try I can’t fail. My first response to myself is that if I haven’t tried I have already failed – but that just highlights my state of mind.

I “know” that all it takes to overcome any and all of these issues is to “face my fears”, “walk the hard road”, believe that “what other people think of me is their problem”, and other such platitudes. And I know that many, many people overcome them every day and in much worse circumstances than mine. I just don’t do it.

Enough for now – time to do some more “procrastinating” in bed with my wife instead of here in front of the uncaring computer …

😉 😀