Back in 2016 I wrote a short post about procrastination.
It was pretty simple… I thought I was spending too much time thinking about things instead of doing them. The diagnosis was straightforward: I needed to get a grip, stop messing about, and get back to being productive. So I made a list… reading, exercise, work, creativity. Clear the decks, start fresh. That kind of thing.
Looking back, it wasn’t wrong… but it also wasn’t enough.
I don’t think effort was ever really the issue. I could work hard when I actually engaged with something. The problem was the cycle… putting things off, telling myself a story about why that was fine, and then repeating it again the next time.
I got quite good at believing my own excuses.
“I’ll do it later…”
“I work better under pressure…”
“I just need a bit more time to think it through…”
It all sounds reasonable… until you notice it’s the same pattern playing out again and again.
There’s a line from Tim Pychyl that I came across later…
Procrastination isn’t really a time management problem… it’s a way of managing how we feel.
That really made me think, because I hadn’t ever considered my feelings as the thing driving my procrastination. When I look back, I wasn’t avoiding tasks… I was avoiding whatever came with them. Boredom, pressure, the chance of not doing something well.
Putting it off made me feel better in the moment… at least until later showed up.
Over the years I tried a lot of the usual fixes… to-do lists, journaling, blogging, posting on social media, planning things out properly, building systems to make it easier.
Most of it didn’t really change anything. If anything, I probably just got better at organising the procrastination… and making it more visible.
I don’t think this really shifted until around 2020… and even then it wasn’t one thing.
The first was faith. Not in a vague abstract sense… something real. It changed the way I saw a lot of things, especially responsibility. Less about trying to prove something, more about living intentionally in response to God, and in relationship with him.
There’s a verse in Ecclesiastes that speaks to this:
Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.
I like that because it doesn’t overcomplicate things. There will always be a reason to wait. The conditions will never be perfect. At some point you have to stop staring at the sky and put something in the ground.
The second was accountability. Not public accountability, not posting intentions online… but having someone in my life who understood me and who I was genuinely accountable to. That’s the power of a good relationship. It’s easy to ignore a list… it’s harder to ignore a person.
That didn’t suddenly turn me into some kind of productivity king. I didn’t wake up at 5am and start smashing through goals… it was slower than that. Small changes, resetting when things slipped, making progress in pieces.
Another idea came along that shifted my perspective on this… that was a real penny drop moment.
James Clear talks about falling to the level of your systems, not rising to your goals. Every time I relied on motivation… I drifted. Every time something had a place, a slot, a bit of structure… it was more likely to happen. So I started building that in.
The difference now is I spot it earlier. If something takes ten or fifteen minutes… I just get it done. If something involves other people… I try to meet face to face. It’s much harder to drift when you’ve looked someone in the eye and agreed something.
And I use my calendar a lot more than I used to. Conversations turn into slots, ideas turn into follow-ups… things have somewhere to land.
But the real edge for me now isn’t the small stuff… it’s finishing.
I’ve got more ideas, notes, and half-formed articles than I’ve ever had. Capturing thoughts, structuring them, getting them out of my head… that part flows. Arbor has helped with that. Not because it writes the articles for me, but because it lowers the friction around keeping track of the thoughts. I can talk something through, catch the shape of it, and come back to it later.
The work is still mine, but fewer ideas disappear before I get to them.
The hard bit is sitting down and turning one of them into something finished.
This article is one of them.
I’d noticed for a while that the Garden side of my site… the “how I’m living” side… was a bit light. Plenty of thoughts, plenty of notes, but not much actually written up. It would have been easy to leave it there… keep sketching ideas, keep improving the system.
Instead, this time, I picked one… and finished it.
I’m naturally drawn to the ideas, the structure, the systems around it. I like solving the problem of writing more than I like writing. Left unchecked, I’ll happily engineer the perfect setup and never quite get to the actual work.
That’s where I need to employ some discipline now. Not trying to fix everything in one go… just recognising the signs and intentionally choosing something different.
As my boss often says, “perfect is the enemy of done.”
I still procrastinate.
Ten years on, the biggest change isn’t that I’ve beaten it… it’s that I recognise it sooner and I do something about it.
I schedule it…
and I don’t put it off twice.
