I can’t get myself to work on the book. It’s been two weeks and I haven’t even opened the project file once. Instead, I’ve been doing a bunch of small tasks and working on side-projects. I know what I need to work on, I have a plan, and my future depends on this plan getting accomplished. So what’s my problem?
I’m not lazy
At first I tried to assign a label of a lazy person to myself, that would be a simple answer. But that’s not right. My actions define who I am in each moment. When I am acting productively – I am a productive person, when I’m acting lazily – I am a lazy person. So that’s backwards to just assign a label to myself. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m currently not productive.
I’m afraid
My app “CraftSpan” is basically ready to go. People have already told me that it looks good, and the next step of my development plan is to start a private beta test to catch more bugs before making it public. And yet I keep delaying it. Every time I’m getting close to sending out the installers to my friends, I go back and decide to test the entire app myself to find more issues to tackle. That has been going on for a while now, and I don’t think it will ever end with my current attitude.
My goal isn’t to make it perfect, I just don’t want it to end up below their expectations. When there’s no deadline and no audience, I can keep working freely. But as soon as there’s some kind of expectation tied to it, I start making endless to-do lists. The lists get so long, vague and frustrating that I don’t even want to continue.
It’s the same with the book. I’ve already set expectations with the anatomy studies I posted before. Now that I’m working on a chapter about perspective, which I’m less confident in, I start worrying that I might underperform. So I start doing endless research and trying to learn more and more just to make the chapter as accurate as possible, when what I should really do is just make a first draft and iterate from there.
The changes I’m making
The solution isn’t more checklists, it’s better checklists! I used to have a physical todo list with clear tasks that I’d check off one by one. It worked well, but now I don’t do that anymore, now I have vague goals in Notion.
The first change is to transform these goals into something more approachable. I should be able to tick off those checkboxes at a steady rate to feel progress.
Then I will return to my roots and write those tasks out on sticky notes that I’ll stick to my drawing tablet. This way I have a constant reminder even if I’m not always looking at the Notion page.
If you’re in a similar situation, try setting clearer goals too!
See you next Saturday, now I have to go buy some sticky notes.
