Procrastiblanket
Procrastinate Your Way to Finished Projects
If you don’t learn a new word today I will give you your money back.
I am on a tear this week and the tear is procrastination. Tuesday’s Shelf Life was about how to stop planning your story and actually work on it, which shrewd readers may have recognized as an article about how to stop procrastinating on one specific thing. We discussed the reasons why people may put off starting their draft—various cases of fear, perfectionism, overwhelm, or self-doubt.
Today’s Shelf Life is about a strategy that I use when to turn procrastination into a helpful tool for getting things done. My friend Gail shared her term for this with strategy with me. She calls it procrastiworking.
The key to procrastiworking, as I understand it, is this: When you have to do something and you don’t want to do it, your brain can do some amazing gymnastics and make any other task sound appealing. This is why you may find yourself compelled to do the dishes right now when it’s time to work on your taxes or cleaning the baseboards when you told yourself you would sit down and work on your novel.
Procrastination is an incredible method for turning boring, distasteful tasks into must-do, top-priority tasks through its transformative power. Suddenly, the thing you must do—whatever it is—is the most boring and distasteful task possible, which means all the actually boring and distasteful tasks get a promotion to less-horrible.
I am a bigtime procrastinator, as I have talked about before here in Shelf Life (Dreaded P Word). I’m a pressure-prompted person. I need the pressure of a looming deadline to get most things done. I know this about myself and I’ve learned to work with it. What is Shelf Life if not a set of recurring Tuesday/Thursday deadlines to make myself write?
Spoiler alert: It’s working.
Anyway, let me tell you about my strategy. It’s simple: I never have just one thing I am procrastinating about. There are always multiple things. At the moment my writing projects are numerous and more than one is in active work. By active work I mean I’ve done real work on it in the last few weeks, not just opened the file, looked at it, and closed it again. All of these writing projects are highly procrastinatable.
Procrastinatable is not a word. Spellcheck just wants to make sure we all know.
What is working well for me is to alternate between writing projects so when I just can’t make myself work on one of them, I turn to another one and write a bit on that one. This is working to an extent. However, sometimes I get the procrastination bug and none of my writing projects feel doable. The bathroom could use a deep cleaning, though. We have one of those 1990s-era jetted bathtubs. Why would I write fiction when I could be deep-cleaning the grout in my shower?!
For these situations, I have the procrastiblanket. To give you a visual, the procrastiblanket I’m making is this one by Mallory Krall. It is made from a series of squares. Mallory Krall’s original blanket—which may or may not have been a procrastiblanket, I have no way to know—calls for sixty-three squares, but any number of squares will work as long as you can form a rectangle out of them in the end (hers, for example, is seven squares wide by nine squares tall). It takes me about twenty minutes to make a square. After making several dozen, I can now do it without thinking. This photo represents ten minutes of procrastination I did during the revision of chapter three of my novel earlier today:
As you see, I can stop anywhere in the middle of a square and pick it back up later so I need not procrastinate in twenty-minute chunks. I can procrastinate to any desired length of time.
Sharp eyes may detect the presence of a mouse and laptop in this photo. (That is my day-job laptop, closed for the day.) It’s critical that I can work on the procrastiblanket from my desk chair, in front of my monitor, without leaving my workspace. Every few days when the squares pile up I take them to another part of the house where I’m blocking them in batches. Eventually, when all the squares are made, I’ll bring them back to my office so I can start joining them together into a single blanket while I’m procrastinating.
What I do is I work on my revision, or my draft, or my edit, or my submissions (dog forbid) until my ADHD is screaming at me and all I want to do is take an old toothbrush and some borax paste to those jacuzzi jets and then I pause in my writing, pick up the procrastiblanket, and work on it for a few minutes. I don’t leave my office. I resist the overwhelming urge to clean the bathroom. My brain immediately calms down. “Yessssss,” says my brain. “We’re doing it, we’re procrastinating.”
I have made this selfsame square forty four times already. I can make them with complete mindlessness at this point. I would not be shocked to wake up from a deep sleep halfway through a square. (I am at the halfway point as I’m planning to make an eighty-eight square blanket, eight squares wide by eleven tall.) It does not take long for my mind to wander once I start making one.
Where does my mind wander? Right to the manuscript work in front of me. I find that pretty much every time I do this, my brain gets instantly bored and starts drafting new text that should follow what’s on the screen in front of me. More and more until my brain is full of text. Then I put the square down and transcribe the text in my brain. And keep writing some more. Until the next time my brain is like “Hey what if we laundered all the linens in the house?” And then the cycle begins anew.
The procrastiblanket I am currently working up is only the most recent in a long and noble lineage of procrastiblankets, most of which have since been given to friends with babies. I have also made a procrastidogsweater here and there.
The key attributes of the procrastiwork project are:
Easy to pick up and put down without losing my place.
Mildly to moderately mindless.
Can be done in the same space as my writing.
It also helps—a fourth bullet that I’m not recording as a bullet—if I have a deadline for the procrastiwork, as I often do with a baby blanket. That helps me prioritize the procrastiproject instead of wandering off to do some other thing. If I know somebody’s baby shower is in six weeks its easier to focus on the procrastiblanket than if I’m just making a blanket for the guestroom, as I am right now.
I realize that crochet is not for everyone. I am in my Grandma Era despite having no children let alone grandchildren—and all my pets are spayed—so I enjoy things like crocheting blankets, sewing, making sourdough bread, and caring for houseplants. You might also call this my tradwife era but if you did my girlfriend and I would be very cross with you indeed.
But any project that fits the bill—the bullet(ed) bill above—might do the trick to help a procrastinator begin their Writing Steadily Era. I have helpfully thought of some of these projects for you, like:
Coloring a coloring book.
Practicing calligraphy.
Putting together a LEGO.
Drawing or writing in a journal.
Embroidering.
Painting D&D miniatures.
Doing your taxes (special once-annual procrastiwork).
Carving scrimshaw.
A person who carves scrimshaw is a scrimshander. You probably already knew that but, if not, now you do. A gift of a word, truly. No, I don’t know where you can get whalebone. Scratch that—I found the place that sells animal bones for carving. They’re having a summer skull sale.
Won’t the real scrimshander please stand up?1
Full disclosure: Sometimes I work on the procrastiblanket during meetings so I don’t die of fidgetiness. During these times the procrastiblanket is referred to as my emotional support handicraft.
I have found that having a procrastiproject on my desk at all times prevents me from wandering away from my writing desk to procrastinate somewhere else in the house—or, imagine this, outside the house—which significantly lowers the chance that I will come back to my writing project timely.
For those who don’t know how to crochet, I learned from watching Youtube videos. All you need is a hook and a ball of yarn. It also helps to have a manuscript you can work on while you’re procrastinating on your blanket.
In conclusion, here is the progress on my procrastiwork that occurred during the writing of this Shelf Life.
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I got out of bed at one o’clock in the morning to add that joke to today’s Shelf Life.