FOOLPROOF HACKS TO END PROCRASTINATION

I usually don’t have writer’s block, but I do procrastinate when starting a project. OK, I guess that is a form of writer’s block, except I procrastinate things that have nothing to do with writing, like cleaning out the closet or taking the dogs to the groomer.

I also suck at making decisions, as you might have guessed. I blame my zodiac sign, Libra, for not being able to decide to save my life, except in Vedic astrology, I’m Virgo. Oh well.

I am working on a big project and I’ve been putting off continuing for months, mainly because I cannot decide HOW I want to tell the story. It was getting to the point where I was beating myself up emotionally, feeling like a giant loser, and even going so far as to ask myself if perhaps it was time to hang up the writing dream forever and just retire.

Ask and it shall be given. In one day, about a week ago, I received two emails that changed it all for me. I get a lot of emails from writers with Substacks and I subscribe to a lot of personal growth newsletters, so my inbox is always overcrowded with someone wanting to share a great hack or give advice. I often get so many, I can’t decide which ones to read, so I delete them all.

But for some reason I opened these two. The first one included a hack for beating procrastination that sounded so simple, I couldn’t imagine it worked. Because it was so simple and didn’t require me to do much of anything, I tried it. It worked!

The hack was to write down and say out loud, “I will NOT do this thing (fill in the blank).” You have to really mean it, though. Tell yourself you are just not going to do it and then let it go. YOU HAVE TO MEAN IT, THOUGH. I was so disgusted and at my breaking point that I meant it alright. I was giving myself full permission to not do the damned thing. I meant it. I was so done with the damned thing.

I know the manifestation master Neville Goddard teaches something similar to this. He says to say or write down something like, “I will not lose weight” or “I won’t be rich” if you want to lose weight or be rich and it seems to work on a deep level to give yourself permission to well…give yourself permission. You can look for videos of his lectures on YouTube where he explains the power of negation.

So, I wrote it down and said it out loud, then I walked away and put my mind on something else. Oh, and I tore up a bunch of notes I had on my desk, too. That’s how serious I was about not doing it.

Six hours later, I was at my desk working on said thing like a madwoman, and I haven’t stopped since. Apparently, when you give yourself permission to not do something, your agonizing conscious mind can then go on to other things. You also free your equally agonizing subconscious mind to make the decision to do it or not do it. By cutting off the constant pressure, you open the valve and release the pent up energy. Then, you realize you either don’t want do it, and you’ve given yourself permission to not do it. Or, like me, you realize you want to do it and you’ve given yourself permission to do it.

So simple, yet so profound. Giving yourself permission is the key, but so is letting yourself off the hook.

The other hack involved an easy and intuitive way to make a decision, for us, ahum…Libra types. Say you cannot decide whether you should buy the red car or the blue car. You stand up straight, arms at your side, feet together. Close your eyes. Now, you say out loud, “red car.” Then be aware of any “lean” to your body. If your body leans forward, it’s the right choice. If you lean backward, it is not the right choice. Hey, I didn’t make the rules, but I tried it and it worked for me when I couldn’t decide between two different methods for writing my book. The lean was pretty pronounced but it can be slight, so you have to just give in to your body and let it do what it is going to do. No forcing the outcome!

By the way, I have awful MDDS, which is a “rocking” form of vertigo and I lean all the time when standing still, so I had to be very careful to discern this from my usual feeling like I’m on a damn boat. It was different. I cannot quite explain how or why, but it was.

You can also start by saying, “blue car.” Never mind, don’t do that. That would require making a decision. Just say whichever comes to mind first, and see which way you lean. Here’s the key, though. You can only do this once. You cannot repeat this to “just make sure” because it’s all about first intuition. You start second-guessing your own intuition and you’ll be standing there for four days going back and forth between the red and the blue and you’ll start leaning sideways. Do it once. And see how you feel when the lean presents itself.

It’s like doing a coin toss, only it’s not so much about the result of the actual toss as it is how you FEEL about the result that tells you which way to go. Have you ever done a coin toss to make a decision? Try it sometime, only pay close attention to how you FEEL when it turns up heads, or tails. That feeling will be the direction you want to go in and the choice you want to make because it’s your gut/intuition/inner voice. The coin has no power, except for what it can unleash from within, where your inner knowing resides.

Anyhoo, these little hacks worked for me. I have not stopped writing like a madwoman and the ideas are flooding out of me that were probably stopped up in a pressure cooker before I gave myself the permission to walk away. I also chose the narrative format that my lean told me to and it works great! No second-guessing (which is just another form of procrastination, right?)

See if they work for you.