Procrastination and a trusted recipe

The secret ingredient to being an effective procrastinator

Cooking is a great interest of mine despite my aversion to actually doing it, I think it was because I had an agriculturist as a father and a food Concierge as mother. I have eaten all kinds of things, Therefore there might be a lot of food related metaphors in this article; consider this fair warning.

Now let's talk about procrastination, the main ingredient in every creative genius. i'm a procrastinator so I might be a little biased, but as psychology heavy weights have proven “no one is truly objective”.

The word procrastinator comes from the Latin verb procrastinare, which means deferred until tomorrow. Now depending on if you have seen a lot of motivation speaking or if you were paying attention in the

“you’ll all amount to nothing"

teachers class; you would realize the amount of negativity associated with the word.

Personally i think procrastination is the main ingredient in the average creatives nourriture parfaite (that's fancy French for the perfect food, don't blame me, I'm a writer its necessary I use big, fancy words). The real problem is that they forget that every exquisite dish has a secret ingredient which almost never gets talked about.

Imagine pizza with soggy butter instead of that Smooth feel of pure garlic flavoured olive oil, or KFC without whatever the glorious beautiful sauce they marinate their chicken in or even coca cola without that wiff of pure uncut cocaine (I'm kidding the stopped adding that in 1903, besides I highly doubt their cocaine was pure). The point is as much as procrastination is an active ingredient in a creative life, without the secret ingredient it is rendered non sequitur (yes I did it again, although I'm not sure what that word really means it makes me feel like a real writer).

In case you are reading this but you don't understand procrastinators because “you are perfect and you have your life together” allow me to be an advocate for the “less privileged”. Imagine that besides everyone who lives inside your brain there is a privileged medieval British maiden who likes self gratification a lot (let's call her S.E Maiden, please tell me you get that). Now S.E maiden really dislikes boredom and has the authority to do anything she wants whenever she's bored, sometimes she could take a walk to the sink to check if a rat died in it or she would decide it's time to dive into the mysteries of mythical sea creatures; the point being she is free to entertain her self.

So imagine you have an important article to write (like the one you are currently reading, if you haven't gotten bored by now and took a sink break) and this article has a one week time line before publishing, S.E maiden kindly reminds you that its not something you can't accomplish in three days so you do the next logical thing; you kick back and you relax. Three days to submission, you pick up your writing pad but S.E maiden won't have you stressing your self on a Sunday so you do the logical thing and wait for Monday to come. By Monday (I'm sure you know the drill by now, S.E maiden is tired of explaining), welcome to Tuesday morning; article is going up tomorrow morning and then comes the panic monster (the only thing S.E maiden is truly Afraid of).

All of a sudden you receive the grace to sit down for two and half hours researching and writing; a task you could not accomplish in the last 6 days gets done beautifully.

This brings us to the real point of all this - “ingrédient secret” (i honestly don't get why the french has to reverse everything before it is seems correct to them). Now pay careful attention

The secret ingredient to being a successful procrastinator is having a “Deadline"

Without a deadline you allow your self to procrastinate indefinitely. Not to get a muse, not to rest your bones, not to retain objectivity (all of which are valid reasons by the way) but just to procrastinate.

Seriously if you plan on making any major impact or getting any real work done as a procrastinator then get a deadline and stop trying to get rid of a God given gift.

Get a deadline today