While I am, of course, busily making progress on NaNoSuMo (National Novel Submitting Month … national in the sense of, well, my house being a nation …), I happened across a particularly interesting article. Recently in The New Yorker, James Surowiecki wrote a long article on procrastination (and yes, he admitted procrastinating about reading the article). Since procrastination is my middle name (actually, I don’t have a middle name – perhaps my parents are still procrastinating about choosing one?!), I had to read it.
Nice to see so much academic thought going in to procrastination, although clearly it would make a lot more sense if people just stopped doing it, stopped writing about it, and just did whatever they were putting off, but apparently it’s in human nature not to do that. Some humans more than others. The theory that procrastination can be somewhat helpful (if you analyse why you’re doing it) is an interesting one and the idea of procrastinating productively which I read about in Sage Cohen’s book is also handy … but here’s the cruncher, from this Surowiecki article:
This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy.
I have to admit, although it may not look this way to an outsider, I think I am definitely improving in the anti-procrastination stakes. Having a baby (therefore having about three spare minutes a day, all three of which are suffered through in a sleep-deprived state) means that procrastination becomes almost impossible. It’s either do something now or forever hold your peace, so to speak. Baby sleeps: quick, get something done before he wakes up! Considering that, according both to that quote and my own experience, indulging a whim to procrastinate doesn’t make me happy, I’m happy to be having less chances to do it. Perhaps everyone needs a baby to overcome their procrastination issues?
So quickly with reference to NaNoSuMo, just to demonstrate that I’m really not procrastinating: I had the chance to go through my lists of potential agents (Australian only so far) and I have now made a shortlist of agents to send my proposals to. (It’s literally a short list because half of the agents had messages on their websites saying they are not considering new clients at the moment.) Half of this shortlist is highlighted in green because they’re the ones that I liked more for some reason or another – they represent authors I think are similar to me, for example. One I disliked because you had to telephone first – how scary! And probably a good way to cut down on the submissions they receive, since I think I wouldn’t be the only writer a little bit frightened of having to pitch their novel over the phone. This week’s job is to get a synopsis edited for one of the novels. Yes, I’m still having trouble deciding which one to start with. But that’s not procrastination, that’s just lack of a crystal ball. Wish me luck!
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