Sipping the Comfortable Cocktail of Procrastination and Excuses

I’ve lost count of how many people have told me they want to write a book — but never start. They want to be authors, but they’ve invented roadblocks limiting them from writing. They enjoy their comfortable cocktail of procrastination and excuses that gives them license to avoid writing. If you’ve got young kids and both adults have full-time jobs, you really don’t have time for much else but surviving. Give yourself grace for any goals you’re working towards.

Most people are not in that situation though. They’re comfortable in their inaction and indecision1 because both of these scenarios allow them to play out the success of their ideas without testing them in real life.

They don’t want to write, they want to have written. They want to skip the middle bit where they suck for years and no one reads what they have to say, because it’s not worth reading. They want to have published a successful book, not 5 mediocre books and 2 terrible ones and then finally one that gets a bit of traction.

So indecision and inaction are the place they sit. In fact many people I talk to in many areas have the same ideas. People regularly say they want to join me on my really long bike rides but when I tell them about the training involved they don’t want to spend that much time training even if it is really just riding bikes on fun routes.

Many people see the amount of reading I do in a year and say they wish they could read like that. When I suggest they could if they stopped watching as much TV or scrolling random shit on the internet, they don’t want to stop either of those two things.

Most of these people spend more time avoiding the hard tasks2 than it would take to do the hard thing that’s sitting in front of them. Have a hard email to write, spend 5 hours cleaning the house instead.

If you want to be good at anything in life you need to do it. If you want to write, sit down and write. If you want to be in shape, start walking and going to the gym. Do the things you want to do more often than you don’t do them in a week and after some time, you’ll have improved. You may not be good yet but you’ve built a habit of action.

That habit of action can turn into something amazing. I think back to my first 300km gravel bike ride three years ago. When I finished I could barely walk for a week. My feet hurt, my hands hurt, I could barely turn the pedals on my by after days of rest. Three year later I napped the day after, but then set best times on different climbs around town this week. The consistent habit for three year transformed me from someone that barely finished to feeling like the ride wasn’t all that hard and I could go further, and do it again a few days in a row.

This is what week two of Meditations for Mortals had me thinking about, many things I’ve thought about and said to people over the years. You can say you want something till you’re blue in the face, what you spend your time on shows what you think is valuable enough to use your limited time on.

For many, including myself sometimes, that seems to be scrolling endlessly online looking for a random dopamine hit. It seems to be finding anything easy they can do to distract them from the hard work they’ll look back on and value.

#procrastination

It has just started doing CrossFit

#adhd #adhs #procrastination #comic #productivity #meme #adhdmeme

A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all.

Rita Mae Brown

#RitaMaeBrown
#Deadlines
#Inspiration
#Procrastination

Good morning. 🐿️🐿️🐿️

6 August 2025

Yesterday, I finally took the time to mount my new bird feeder atop the post in the middle of the yard. I shored up the post with some short cedar pieces I picked up from Lowe’s ages ago. Funny thing—they’ve been sitting in the backyard shed for years, just waiting for me to get around to it. Kind of like the computer behind me, close enough to touch, with a new fan ready to be installed. I procrastinate sometimes.

Truth is, I take my leisure time more seriously than I used to. My philosophy? If you own a recliner, you’d better use it—otherwise, it’s just going to waste. That’s an important truth, straight from the Drama Llama.

“You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. What mood is that? Last-minute panic.” — Bill Watterson

#morning #squirrel #EasternGraySquirrel #procrastination #BirdfFeeder #photo #photography #photographer #photographylovers #wildlife #nature #leisure

Writing, the Roamer way.

Earlier this year, I discovered a new aspect of a core theory in my fiield. I have discussed it with co-workers and have reason to believe that it is an important insight.

At some point in late spring I sat down and wrote 70 pages of an extensive draft, plus copious notes on numerical illustrations for each of the results. This now needs re-writing as a concise paper.

Being ADD / perfectionist / procastinating, of course I delay this endlessly. I keep working through the same material on paper. re-thinking it, simplifying it, distilling it. At some point, I will sit down at my laptop, open a new file, and type up the whole thing afresh, without using my earlier draft and without looking at my notes. I expect it will be some 20 pages. I pray I get to this point before summer is over.

I am not proud of this working mode, my procrastination causes me deep pain, but I try to manage it and turn it into creativity.

#creativity #writing #procrastination