Procrastinating your dreams

Hi, friends. Katie McManus here, business strategist and leadership coach. I didn't expect to go live today, so I'm actually not in my office. I'm cornered off in a section of my room sitting on a ball. So if you see me bouncing, that is why. But anyway, I wanted to talk about procrastination tonight because guess what? I find myself in the throes of procrastination right now. I don't know if you saw my post earlier today. So I've taken this week mainly off from scheduled client calls. My clients still have access to me. So if you're a client of mine, don't worry, you're allowed to call me. And I'm going to be following up with you on stuff. But the primary focus of this week has been getting my outline finished for my book. Oh, hi, David. Welcome. And just so you guys know, I'm doing this on streamyard. Sometimes the comments don't come through on either Facebook or YouTube or whatever. Looks like LinkedIn is working. But if you comment and I don't respond, it's not you, it's just technology. So, anyway, so I just have so much that I've been meaning to get done over the last couple months, and it's hard. I have add. I've talked about this before. It's hard for people with ADD to do creative work that requires a lot of focus in little windows of time. So I figured, okay, I'm going to block off a week and give myself a whole week. What I didn't factor in is that I have not taken time off since August. August 2020 is the last time I actually took time off. Granted, I took some time off around Christmas, but not nearly enough. And so I was making myself feel so bad about it Monday and Tuesday, and today I was like, why am I making myself feel bad about this? You're a human. You're not a robot, for one. And some of my friends on LinkedIn comments reminded me of this. So thank you, Gu. Human, not a robot. And we all need time to rest. And I don't know if you guys find this and let me know if you do when you're procrastinating. Usually I fill up procrastination with stuff that I really enjoy doing or stuff that's been eating at me for a while, like, for instance, cleaning my space. My house is now immaculate. I am also the proud owner of Houseplants. Let me show you. This is my umbrella plant. It's doing very well. I just put it in this New pot. That's very fancy and well, it's maybe not doing so well, but you know, stay tuned because There are about 10 more that I will hopefully keep alive. Anyway, back to talk about procrastination. I'm sitting on a ball, by the way, so like if you see me bounce or there's like a weird ball noise. Rubber, you know, that's what it is. Anyway, hi, whoever's watching, I'm seeing the number go up, so. Oh, there's a fruit fly. Procrastination. Add, it just goes all together. Where was I? So, okay, so I had so much work that I wanted to get done this week. I am still holding out that I'm going to get most of it done. But here's where I let myself off the hook this week, is that reminding myself I'm a human, not a robot. Humans need rest and need to be able to recharge. Also, the work that I am trying to do is all creative. Creativity does not work like an eight hour workday. Okay? So my jobs and sales where I had to cold call or I'm not cold call, but like follow up with people for eight hours. Creativity does not work that way. Okay? And also people with add, we don't work that way. We do things like under the, under the gun. I don't really like that term though because it indicates there's going to be violence and I hate violence. So. Yeah. But the other thing about procrastination is that in the space when you are cleaning your room or when you are making a really fancy dinner for your friends and family, which I did tonight, it was really good. You're, you're constantly thinking of ideas like, it's not that you're not working on it, it's not that you're not. I used to find this in college. All the time I'd be procrastinating writing the paper, meaning I wouldn't be going and you know, like taking notes on index cards and getting it all organized. But I would be working through my arguments in my head. I'd be working through the point I'd want to make. And the same thing that I found myself doing the last couple days is I'm working through in my mind exactly how I want to do these videos. I'm strategizing that I'm thinking about my book and what parts need to go in there and I'll make quick notes in between things. I guess what I'm trying to say is that when you procrastinate, it's actually part of your work process. Work happens in the procrastination. And what actually gets in the way of that is when you living you. Oh, thank you, Steve. You're living me. I don't know, but thank you very much. I'll take that as a compliment. But so when you start judging yourself, when you start making yourself wrong for not doing the work. Trying to understand Steve, what do you want to understand? The whole process of procrastination. Do you procrastinate? Yeah. So when you. I'm like curious what he's having a hard time understanding because I want to be super clear. So when you find yourself procrastinating and I'm, I'm saying this like it's easy, I get sucked into this all the time. No one's perfect. And we get super judgy of ourselves. But anyway, when you find yourself procrastinating and you find yourself judging yourself about it, that is actually what hurts your productivity later. Okay, I got a laughing face from that. Oh gosh, Joseph Kane. A stitch in time saves nine. But there is more than one way to skin a cat. Lol. Yeah, there is. There absolutely is. And I hope no one's skinning cats. Just for the record. Steve. Yeah, I work hard. Okay, cool. Yeah, I mean, and this is not saying that we're not all working hard. Okay? This is, this is saying, you know, part of the work is empty space. And here's something that our society doesn't set us up for. You know, we go through school, you know, kindergarten through 12th grade, and our time is packed. It is absolutely jam packed from. I don't know about you guys, but I know school started at 7:30 in the morning. It went till 2. There was a 25 minute lunch break and 5 minutes in between classes. And my school was really long. It was like a quarter of a mile long. And it was a really weird setup. So sometimes you'd be late to class just because you had class on the other end of the building. There was no breathing space. And when we're talking about creative work, writing, creating content, all that stuff, it needs space. It can't be scheduled. Okay? Like schedules and time blocks and times tables actually gets in the way of creative work. It's counterproductive to doing any kind of creative work. And yet that is the style of work that we were taught. And then of course, you get a job and your job expects you to clock in at this time, do all these tasks, and then clock out at this time. There's literally no space in there for you to just sit at your desk for an hour with nothing in front of you, nothing to do, where you're just allowed to interact with whatever it is that comes up for you. And Steve, I don't judge. Oh, you're a teacher. I'm not a teacher. I used to want to be a teacher, but then I realized that children were wonderful in small doses and, you know, small, small groups of them, not large groups of them, but so there. And you know, you said, you say that, and there's this Montessori approach to parenting and teaching, and I'm just gonna do some teacher talk, is that you actually let kids get bored. You let kids get bored because that's where the creative games come from. Okay? That's where like play acting and being like, you're the robber and I'm the troll and we're going to go rescue the princess. That whole stuff, all that stuff comes out of boredom. And, you know, I'm not going to blame devices. I'm not going to blame just work. I think it's a mix of all these different things. We don't let ourselves be bored. We don't let ourselves just kind of like aim driftlessly until creativity strikes us. And we need to. We need to. It is critical, especially if you run a business, because guess what? There are going to be problems that pipe up or pop up. Pipe up, pipe up, pop up, pop up. Yeah. Can you tell the late and I'm a little tired. They're going to be problems that pop up that you're going to need creative solutions to. There's also going to be opportunities that you're going to miss if you don't let that creativity just flow through you and let yourself be bored. There's also this philosophy around procrastination that procrastination is an avoidance of feelings. Okay, so say I have this huge project that I'm working on, right? And you know, I get overwhelmed by huge projects. They always have. I kind of need to like parse them down smaller bits and then I don't feel as overwhelmed. But me procrastinating could totally be me wanting to avoid the overwhelm of it, which I mean, like the overwhelms always going to be there, right? It could also be, you know, you've never done this before. You've never done this before, so you don't know how it's going to go. And that's kind of a scary feeling. Requires a little bit of bravery. And so procrastination can come from that kind of place. As well. I just want to check in on the comments. Yeah, we have Steve. We have David Mumford. Okay, I'm all caught up. And Joseph Kane. Hi, everyone. Anyway, but yeah, so the other thing about procrastination is that we have all the compassion and understanding in the world for other people when they're procrastinating and feeling stressed out about stuff. We forget to have that for ourselves. Okay? And I'm a coach. I talk about this shit all day long. I'm reminding my clients all day long that they are human, that they are not robots. They can't expect themselves to just hop to and do the thing. And yet I forget this. So if you screw up with this, know that I work on this and I screw up on it, too. Anyway, those are just my thoughts about procrastination. I thought it might be valuable. I don't know if it is. I'm also a little uncomfortable on this ball, so I'm probably not gonna stay this. Like, I have my workout stuff up here. This is where I do my Pilates with the amazing Savannah Hein. Who's amazing if you want to do Pilates at home, she's amazing. But I've been trying to use this ball as a chair for this desk and it hasn't worked because I don't know if you guys have ever tried to use a balls as something when you're actually writing and not typing. It completely screws up your. Your handwriting, for one. And I'm doing that because my chair broke because. Fun fact, Massachusetts. The air gets super dry in the winter. And if you have wooden chairs, they splinter and they disconnect down the seat. So that's always fun. Anyway, random facts for you all. But, yeah, so I'm procrastinating. I'm going to be getting over this tomorrow because I'm on a deadline and. And I have a really nice clean house and I have tons of yummy food in the refrigerator now because I've been cooking up a store. By the way, tonight was supposed to be fish tacos. I screwed up and didn't end up getting tortillas because I just forgot. And so I made latkes instead, thinking, because latkes and sour cream. And fish tacos. And sour cream. Amazing. Can I just tell you, they. They beat the fish tacos any day. I think it has something to do with all the oil that you use and the fact that it's potatoes. And who doesn't love potatoes? But, oh my God, it was to die for. Anyway, I'll leave you all with that. Hope you're all having a nice evening and I will talk to you soon. Bye.