Procrastinate Now. Don't Put It Off*

Chris Brady

Contributing to this blog has been great fun this past year.  The four broads – Carol, Julie, Mary and I -- came together as unpublished writers who wanted to experiment with social networking. I enjoy my weekly glimpse into their hearts and souls, and it’s fun reading the responses to my posts.  

So with all of the rewards associated with being part of this blog, I am baffled why I wait until the last possible minute to start writing my post.  It’s only once every three weeks.  I should have it simmering at least by the second week, at the very latest after I read Carol’s post.  Yet here I am on Thursday night, waiting for inspiration.

I pored through my documents folder looking at half-baked ideas I had written in recent months. I started and stopped three different themes that just would not go anywhere.  I even googled "blog topics" for ideas.  Nothing was coming to me.

As I searched far and wide for inspiration -- by reading email and Facebook -- I came across a video on procrastination.  I learned why we put off doing things we know we need to do.  It’s called hyperbolic discounting.  When a perceived reward is off in time, we don’t do the work we need to do to achieve it until it gets closer to us. Then when the deadline nears, we dive into the work because the “reward”  (getting the blog posted) or the dis-incentive (the embarrassment of missing a deadline) is so close we can taste it.

Procrastination has worked out well for me a few times in my life. When I was in high school, I delayed writing an assignment because I just couldn’t find a topic when I started the work. I faked illness to stay at home on the day the paper was due. My fever to avoid an “F” inspired a story. My teacher submitted it to a national creative writing contest and it won a prize. The recognition led me on the path toward a journalism degree and a writing career. 

The video showed me a new trick called the Pomodoro Technique to help manage my procrastinating, and I think I will try it out this weekend.  Then again, maybe I'll wait until three weeks from now when it’s my turn to write.  

Share your stories about how you embrace or overcome procrastination.

*Headline credit:  Ellen DeGeneres

Google Me

To the annoyance of my friends and family, I have avoided social networking venues like Facebook and Twitter. Frankly, I have always valued my privacy. If someone wanted to find me, let them do a little work. I was keeping myself to myself.

Until now.

My debut in this blog is calculated, because I know there is safety in numbers. Too, my blogging companions flex some writing muscle. Investigating other blogs also got me wondering what might already be “out there” about me. So, I did what any modern woman would do:

I googled myself.

I googled myself in a number of ways and found few surprises: professional affiliations, my business information, some articles. I learned there are 962 Mary Foxes in the world. But an unexpected gift was the only photo I found of myself. It is the one I’ve selected to appear with my blog.

In my life, I have had my share of high hopes and desperate disappointments. But when I suddenly encountered myself as I had been exposed on the web in this photo, I embraced the embodiment of my core beliefs, captured in this candid snapshot. And the laugh is on me: despite my best attempts at privacy, I have no idea who took this photo or how it got on the web.

Seeing myself so exuberantly exposed also telescoped me back to another illuminating moment of my life.

It was Spring 1978. My last semester at LaSalle. In one of those pop psych courses so popular with seniors who need three more credits to graduate, we were given an assignment: write your own epitaph

My life was pretty rocky then. I was graduating with my last breath of effort, determined not to lose everything despite some dire outside circumstances. I was also 21 and full of hope.

Now, at 55, looking at this photograph and recalling that epitaph, I realize how true those old words were and how far they did, and could still, take me.

To introduce you to my blog, I give you:

My Epitaph

There once was a woman named Mary

Whose adventures were just a bit scary

But through all she tried

Till the day that she died

And life was fun: wasn’t it, Mary?