Working On Me

I am a natural procrastinator. Often, I won't undertake a task until it is very nearly too late. This isn't usually because of a lack of time or a lack of skill, but a lack of will. Of course, leaving everything to the last moment can be a disastrous way to operate, so I have to curb my natural tendencies as much as I can.

The best way I have found to tackle procrastination is to lie to myself. I first came across the technique in the writing of Mark Forster and it capitalises on the comparative ease with which we can fool our unconscious minds.

You need to say to yourself that you are not going to actually do the job you're putting off, but rather that you are just going to prepare to do it, or start it by taking some very trivial action, and then stopping.

Here are some examples:

• I'm not going to call the customer, but I will look up the number and make a note of it.
• I'm not going to write that article, but I'll just brainstorm to identify the main content and ideas.
• I'm not going to clear the spare room, but I will find some bin bags and boxes that will help me.

The idea is all about creeating momentum. I often find that once I've finished the minor task, I just carry on into the major one. Even if I don't, I have genuinely accomplished something and made the job just a little bit smaller anyway.

I am fascinated with the idea of externalising the thought process. I've written about it in several guises here in the blog over the last year, and it seemed appropriate to look at them all together as my hundredth blog post.

Thought happens very quickly, much more quickly than speech, for instance. This is why the mind can wander when we're listening to someone speak; we can process information mentally far more quickly than the typical speed at which a person speaks. But this speed is at a cost. Often before we have fully explored an idea, we have moved on to something else. Worse, even a great idea can be quickly lost of we don't find some way of recording it before it is washed away in the tide of our relentlessly changing thought stream.

The answer is to force the thinking to slow down, to eternalise it. One way to do this is to 'think aloud'. People often say they do their best, clearest thinking when they are talking to someone else. Reducing the thought to the speed of speaking makes us think more deeply and with more care, even when we're talking quite quickly. This is surely one of the reasons why psychoanalysis and counselling are believed to be so worthwhile; when you externalise your thinking, you improve its quality.

I've looked at a number of ways of externalising your thinking in my blog, such as the brainstorm session for one, problem solving with a journal and writing daily goals. All three of these techniques work so well because they slow down and externalise the thought process, and the benefits of this are enormous.

Right now, as an exercise, grab a piece of paper or open a new text file or word processing document. Write at the top an open question you've been wondering about. It needs to be incapable of a yes or no answer. Words like "why" or "how" are good ways to start your question and what follows can be about your work, your relationships, goals or just about anything.

Once you've written the question, start writing some possible answers. Don't force it, and feel free to write around the subject and go off at tangents, but keep coming back to the question itself. I promise you will make real progress far greater than if you had simply continued to ponder the question in your head.

My purchase of a new 80GB iPod Classic (happy birthday, me!) allows me to travel with my entire collection of music in my pocket. Ths includes records I haven't listened to in years, an some I'm sure I've never listened to at all. But at any given time, choosing what to listen to is not a trivial matter. With 3,000 songs to choose between, where do I start? Too much choice can bring paralysis. The choice to be made is simply too daunting.

Writers have the ultimate free choice, of course: a blank page. A trick they often use to snap out of the 'too much choice' trap is to set themselves artificial restrictions. For instance, they might determine to write a first person narrative without using the words 'I' or 'me' more than once per page, or write entirely in iambs or trochees. It turns out that restricting your choices can actually improve creativity.

Creativity is all about connecting things and ideas that haven't been connected before. Just as in any other endeavour, this becomes easier if you practise, so here is one of my favourite creativity exercises.

Go to your bookcase (or to the library) and pick up any three books. Make the selection totally random. Retire somewhere comfortable with a pen, paper and the three books. Flick though them. If one or more is non-fiction, read through the contents page. Now on the paper, list as many connections as you can between the three books. Absolutely anything goes: they're all written by Americans, for instance, they all make reference to journeys or they all have some green on the cover.

When you thing you've got as many connections as you can find, count them. Now set yourself the target of doubling that number. Skim again through some of the text, letting your mind range free and allow the more off-the-wall connections come to light. You'll be surprised how creative you can be.

Those of you who journal can use this as a journalling exercise, too. Rather than listing all the connections, though, just pick one and expand on it, exploring the relationship between the books.

For the past couple of years, I have been doing all of my family's ironing, and I love it. I do it in a quiet part of the house, for a couple of hours at a time, and listen to audiobooks while I do it. Sometimes the audiobooks are fiction, sometimes they represent study.

I find that the task of ironing leaves just the right amount of mental capacity to listen properly to the book, without leaving enough to wander off and distract my attention. When subsequently reviewing my retention, I find that listening while ironing has been by far the most productive study method for me.

Having abandoned mind maps, I have been looking for alternatives that might actually work for me. I'm not there yet, but in my search I stumbled on PigPog's excellent nowMap. The concept is very simple. I've downloaded and used the forms a little and whilst I'm not yet convinced they are far away enough from mind mapping to be right for me, the addition of some structured information around it is a big step towards usability.

The accepted wisdom is that mind maps are the way to go. It is claimed that they mirror the way your mind works, that they help cement associations and can store a lot of detail in a comparatively small space.

I've tried using them many, many times. I have always found they offer me no advantage at all over a conventional, written list. Sure that I must be missing something, I have come back to them several times - I've bought and read books on them - but they still just don't do it for me.

So I'm moving on, saying goodbye to mind maps for the last time.

Now then, what's the next thing?