Procrastination is a solution, not a problem

It’s the start of the week, your To Do list is looming and the risk of procrastination is high.

So let’s have a look at what’s going on, shall we?

Behind the scenes

Imagine you had a report to write. With a deadline. And you don’t want to.

And find yourself avoiding it in whatever way you’ve learned (I play a little game on my phone called Plasma Sky, what do you do?)

Here’s a behind-the-scenes for you:

1. The mind is aware of the report and the deadline (the situation)
2. The mind thinks that it has to write the report (even though it only ever has access to old, stale data on its hard drive, which isn’t the source of creativity)
3. The mind, understandably, panics. All of a sudden, the report is a ‘problem’
4. The mind defines this ‘problem’ as real, because it’s completely—innocently—unaware of anything outside of itself (i.e. life energy/wisdom/creativity/innate health/true nature/who-we-really-are) and it genuinely believes it’s in charge of everything… when really it’s just a tool, given menial tasks to do like remember old stuff and move our hands
5. The mind goes into a spin, now burdened not only with a) the ‘problem’ of the report, but also b) the ‘problem’ of all the other stuff it’s just created around not being able to deal with the initial problem, all of which it also thinks it has to solve
   (There's 5c to 5z here too, but you get the picture. Suffice to say, it’s easy for this stuff to spiral 😵‍💫)
6. Wisdom kicks in to offer a genuine solution to all of this ‘problem’ creation. It pulls the plug
7. (This is critical) The quality of this solution depends wholly on our level of understanding of 1 – 6, above, in that moment. (It fluctuates all the time, see?):
   ➤ At the highest levels of awareness, we see there is no problem and we’re not even talking about procrastination. We're present to the report and getting on with it
   ➤ Arbitrarily, let’s say a mid-level consciousness/mood solution is taking a couple of minutes off and playing a video game, before getting back to it
   ➤ And let’s say a seriously low level consciousness/mood solution is going downstairs and immediately consuming an entire bottle of wine, then going on a bender for three days
8. It’s all innocent and it’s all a solution to points 2 & 4 (which themselves are just a misunderstanding)
9. Any time you beat your ‘self’ up about procrastinating, it’s just the mind adding yet another ‘problem’ to the already long-enough list of problems it’s created for us today, thanks!
10. Relax. Re-read this list. Just write the goddamn report already, will you?!

I love you and your problem-creating mind

😘

Giles

Related

In praise of boredom

Can we re-train the mind with awareness alone? 📵

The Daily RemindersGiles P Croft