Learning Not to Procrastinate

Tactics for avoidance, something on morning routines in a four-child homeschooling family, and strong feelings about the "Lockdown Files"

Table of Contents
1. Procrastination            
      Flipping the To-Do List            
      Delaying Gratification            
      The Virtuous Circle
2. Current Daily Routine: Morning
3. Strong Feelings: The Lockdown Files

Procrastination

A post on procrastination comes at the right time for me. Before my post Holy Week and Easter Sunday holiday, I have ten sermons to write, an hour-long Lent course to prepare for, another public appearance later in the month and I am also trying to write a book at the same time. This alongside my regular parish duties, being a husband and father to four children, reaching my work-out and nutrition goals, keeping up with various reading projects (including reading Mary Harrington’s new book in preparation for her appearance on Irreverend) and other things beside that. It is possible and it can be done. But procrastination is the enemy of making sure it happens.

The problem often comes to us when we leave things to the last minute or simply allow things to get worse because we don’t address them early enough or with enough focus. As M. Scott Peck says,

To willingly confront a problem early, before we are forced to confront it by circumstances, means to put aside something pleasant or less painful for something more painful.
M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled, p.19

The two choices, therefore, are to allow the circumstances to force us into action or to take charge of a situation with enough time and energy in hand to master it and make it obedient to our purposes. This will bring about a better overall result and a more pleasurable and ordered experience in obtaining that result, although it may involve a bit more effort in the short-term

Are there any techniques for achieving this?

Flipping the To-Do List

This has probably been the biggest game-changer for me in sorting out my procrastination habits. I think it started sometime around when I was doing my PhD. It made sense to me, upon some advice I heard, to start the day with the heaviest intellectual lifting. This because I was most fresh. Then later in the day to do things that wouldn’t require as much effort, such as, perhaps editing, answering emails or doing admin.

I’ve carried these habits over into parish life but they have morphed into (roughly speaking) doing “creative things” like writing sermons or working on other projects in the morning and then doing the less heavy stuff in the afternoons: emails, meeting with people, other admin etc.

But there was an inherent flaw within this system: there were lots of things that were just never getting done and others that were not getting done very well or with any consistency and enthusiasm. Chief among the latter was emails. I don’t want to complain too much because I know lots of people have far more “email” to deal with than me. But I do man (person??) the Irreverend email as well as managing my own personal email and my church account. It’s not necessarily my favourite thing, although I do take it seriously because it is essential to my parish ministry and I want to help the people who write to me (or us at Irreverend) as much as I can. But I always had this feeling in the afternoon, particularly, I must admit, with regards to the Irreverend account. The latter often ends up with some very heavy stuff, frequently long, frequently intense, sometimes searching, sometimes desperately sad, sometimes needing my thoughts or advice on something. And it feels like a lot.

So, I would sometimes leave it. And then it would be harder to address it the next time I needed to. So I would leave it again. And the cycle would continue. Then, after a couple of weeks, I would finally muster the strength to sit down at the computer and spend quite a bit of time catching up. The latter was, though, superficial and rushed.

Another problem was the things that never felt important enough to do when it came to the afternoon. Two examples: our YouTube account’s payments are frozen because they need some kind of tax information and I have to try and work out how to get it for them. When I looked at it once, it seemed complicated, so I stuck it on the to-do list and I’ve never been back to it. Not good. The other example is the one which awakens my inner-Peterson critic: tidying my office. My ideal is to spend ten to fifteen minutes a day doing this so I don’t end up with books everywhere and a chaotic and cluttered environment. But, because I was leaving it till the afternoon as it was not the “heavy” stuff, I was never doing it and, again, the problem was getting worse and worse and, therefore, a less attractive prospect to address.

So, the situation was that the creative stuff - sermons, writing, podcasts etc - were getting done and going well. But even they felt a bit rushed because I had the pressure of admin in the afternoon weighing on my mind. And the other stuff in the afternoon was always poor. Apart from anything else, I was tired, couldn’t concentrate and couldn’t be bothered.

But (and here’s a little psychological insight into all of this), on some level, I was actually a little bit proud of this situation. Of course my office is a mess, of course I don’t keep on top of my emails, of course my admin is a little bit disorganised. This is because I am creative and gifted and that’s not my area of strength. Other people are good at that sort of thing, but I…I am an exception, and those things are not as important or exciting or impressive as what I can do. I would say things to people, such as, “Admin isn’t necessarily my strongest suit” with a little chuckle as though to imply some of this. But I see now that this was just sheer arrogance and laziness.

The reason I wasn’t doing my admin and emails and other things properly is because of a combination of poor planning, a lack of self-understanding and arrogance. I needed to address it.

The idea came from M. Scott Peck’s, The Road Less Travelled. This book was given to me by a friend and, looking at the cover, I thought it was maybe some kind of New Age self-help book. But nothing could be further from the truth. Peck is a humanist Christian psychologist and this book is packed with inspirational insight on almost every page. (It has loads of fantastic stuff in it about being a parent to boot which I have found most helpful.)

On only page 7 the breakthrough came. Peck speaks about a patient who ordered the time in her work day by doing the most gratifying thing for the first hour and then doing the objectionable remainder for the next six.

I suggested that if she were to force herself to accomplish the unpleasant part of her job during the first hour, she would then be free to enjoy the other six. It seemed to me, I said, that one hour of pain followed by six of pleasure was preferable to one hour of pleasure followed by six of pain. She agreed, and, being basically a person of strong will, she no longer procrastinates.
M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled, p.7

I agreed too and so I have taken to flipping my to-do list. I write down everything that I have to do on a particular day. I then order the tasks from 1 onwards, with 1 being the thing that I am most excited about doing. Then I flip the numbers around and that is my order for doing things during the day. The least enjoyable and exciting task comes first, whilst I am still most fresh and have the most energy and motivation for doing it.

Most of the administrative tasks I have to do don’t take a long time anyway, but I was making such a meal of them in the afternoons that they seemed to go on forever. And, because it is all manageable, I no longer have the psychological block of facing a mess that I have allowed to accumulate.

In terms of my office, this is a paramount example: not only is my office not messy, but, because on average I now tidy it more than I untidy it whilst working, the overall room is improving, such that it is no longer simply about putting stuff in its right place but about creating an overall more pleasant environment. For example, I have realised that there are objects in my office that I never use and make it feel and look cluttered. I have an old office chair that I replaced two years ago that just sits next to the window: why is it there? It never gets used. I have a lamp on my desk that I never turn on. These things can be safely stored in the garage until they are useful again or, if they never are, they can be given away or sold. I also am reordering my personal library such that I no longer end up with piles of random books stacked against the walls. I can hoover and dust because I have given the gift of time to this particular task, and it only takes ten, or at the most, fifteen minutes a day to transform my working environment from a cluttered mess, into a place of inspiration and peace. And this, as I say, is symbolic of those other little niggly tasks that I never get to.

Delaying Gratification

In addition to this, there is also the fact that, in ordering things in this way, I am delaying gratification until later in the day. This motivates me to do the less fun tasks because I know that, later on, I will attend to them and, if I get through the first set of tasks, I will have longer to do the things I am excited about.

The problem Peck was having with his patient was that she had never learnt about or practiced the principle of delayed gratification: she always ate the frosting on a piece of cake before the rest of it, for example. So she needed to experiment with it in her working life and see its value in order to address the issue of procrastination. Peck comments,

Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.
Ibid.

Now, I have to say, that I had this idea down in many areas of life before addressing my working practices, but for some reason I hadn’t applied it to the latter. I didn’t think of the working day in terms of pain and pleasure. But to do so has been transformative for me.

I think I felt guilty on some deeper lever for enjoying aspects of my work, as though work should be about suffering because I am being paid for it. This is nonsense, of course, because it is obviously true that, the more we enjoy our work, the more committed we will be to it and the better we will do it. Maybe we should feel guilty if we are neglecting things and not putting in enough effort, but this is precisely why desire and enjoyment are so important: to help us to order and direct our efforts in such as way as will produce the best overall result.

The Virtuous Circle

Why do we find it hard to discipline ourselves in work, in health, in parenting in the spiritual life and in other ways? Part of the reason (again, according to Peck) is that we don’t value those things enough and we don’t value our input into them, so we neglect them. A lot of the time this is because we have a low regard for ourselves: we feel crap and so we feel that anything we touch will also be crap. Peck comments that these feelings often stem from childhoods in which we are not shown sufficient love by our parents: during childhood we learn for the first time that we are valued and loved by our parents and we take this feeling of confidence and security into the world. But, if we have never been loved in this way, we take into the world feelings of worthlessness and insecurity. And these feelings can lead us towards bad habits and poor results: not doing our best because we feel that our best will be unworthy and inferior.

So, a kind of vicious cycle is produced. Take personal care, for example: I am worthless and therefore I take very little time to care for myself. Much more appealing to simply pig out, eat, drink, sit around and watch TV, because at least that’s enjoyable. What happens then is an exacerbation of the original problem: I put on weight, gets spots, develop health problems, make no strides in my personal life, become less attractive, atrophy intellectually and so on. And then I feel even worse about myself than I did and I have even less motivation to get up and do something worthwhile to improve my situation because…well, I’ve got nothing to offer, so what’s the point? At least watching TV and eating junk food is enjoyable. And there’s something kind of cool about giving a middle finger to the world and saying that I don’t care about it.

This vicious cycle goes for many other areas of life too: I feel rubbish about myself so I don’t try hard at work because my contribution will be poor, so my contribution inevitably is poor and then I feel worse about myself and even less confident.

So, how do you break out of it? It must come, on some level, by recognising that one doesn’t want to live in a vicious cycle but a virtuous circle. The logic that works for the downwards movement also works in the other direction. And it can start from an act of the will. Indeed it must: I might feel like I am totally rubbish and I look rubbish and my contribution is rubbish but I am going to try and improve things and make them as good as I possible can and, eventually, they will improve. That kind of attitude.

I’ve mentioned before that I work with an online personal trainer and that I am part of his private Signal group with dozens of men who are at all stages of the fitness journey. Some of them are overweight, badly so. But they’ve made that decision and they are taking the first steps. It’s great to see. Apart from anything else, when you haven’t been working on something like weight for many years, you can make progress really quickly. The pounds fall away, you feel better, you gain a sense of achievement and confidence and you want to keep going.

What’s happened? You’ve gone from I am rubbish and what I produce is rubbish and therefore will continue to produce rubbish and get worse to Even though I feel rubbish, I am improving and that is making me feel better and therefore I am more motivated to improve further and that is making me feel better and therefore I continue to be motivated and so on. It’s an upward trajectory as opposed to a downwards spiral. I believe that anyone can gain confidence like this. But it does take that act of the will to get going.

Improving things is all about creating these kinds of virtuous circles and resisting the vicious cycle.

Current Daily Routine: Morning

I wanted to do a day in the life sort of thing here because, when I think back, say, two years, I can’t remember very much about my daily routine. But these family times are so precious (and frequently exhausting) that they seem (to me at least) to be worth documenting, so here we go. You might find it reasonably interesting to hear about how we handle things also…or maybe not. It’s up to you.

As we’ve adjusted to having various different numbers of children, our sleeping arrangements have altered. I’ve had period of sleeping in the same bed as all of our children at some point or another (often for many months). At the moment, and since Alexander was born, I sleep by myself in the main bedroom which is next to the two bedrooms occupied by our eldest two boys and Mary, our only girl, respectively. If anything goes wrong with them during the night, I deal with it. I’d say that happens about one in every two or three nights, and it’s normally not that bad. Last night, for example, Rupert woke up crying. I went in to see what the problem was. He needed a number two, so I took him in a rather grumpy and sleepy state and, after a period of time that was slightly longer than I’d have liked it to be, he was back in bed and I could go back to sleep. I don’t know what time that happened, but I estimate about midnight or one o’clock. At about half past three I was woken again, this time by one of them coughing loudly, but they didn’t wake up. After that, I think I managed to get back to doze off a bit, but I knew I was scheduled to wake up at five, so I didn’t get any decent sleep. Eventually, about half past four, I gave up and got out of bed. It was cold.

When I get up depends upon whether or not I’m working out in the morning. If I am working out, I set my alarm for 5. If I’m not, it’s 5.45 or slightly earlier if I want a bit more time. I begin my day with morning prayer which I do from the Book of Common Prayer. I am trying currently to spend more time meditating upon Scripture in a Lectio Divina style, so I strip back the office significantly to give more time and space for that. After I’ve finished doing that (it takes about half an hour), I read something. What I’m reading for my morning book depends upon various things, but I am generally looking for something that is going to fill me with enthusiasm on a spiritual level. At the moment, for example, I am reading From Plato to Christ by Louis Markos, which I’m finding really good. After that, I do my workout. I used to do my workout after breakfast but I have realised that doing it at about 6am is a way better time. The children aren’t awake and it’s much easier for me to focus. Plus there is a sort of mental clarity one has at that time in the morning. That takes about an hour and I do it three times a week. After that, it’s breakfast with the children who are normally awake by this stage. (I get one day off per week getting up with the children when Lorna gets up with them all and then my routine is quite different albeit with similar elements.) I get Lorna’s breakfast and take it to her and then I get breakfast for me and the children with the exception of Alex who is still with Lorna. At the moment the kids are eating Shreddies followed by Cheerios, always with honey and yoghurt. I eat a high-protein granola with 150grams of Skyr Yoghurt mixed with protein powder and some fruit. My breakfast has just over fifty grams of protein in it and a good amount of carbohydrate. It keeps me feeling full until lunch, even when I’ve done a lot of exercise. I haven’t mentioned this yet, but I drink between two to three cups of coffee from the time I get up to the end of breakfast. That helps with the early mornings and the broken sleep.

At breakfast time, we often work on memorising a poem. At the moment, we’re memorising The Jumblies by Edward Lear. I sometimes play a version of it on my phone and we go over the bit we’re working on. After they’ve eaten their first lot and I’ve finished mine, I replenish them with more food and then read to them. I often read an extract from a history book for children and young adults called The Story of the World and I read part of a story. At the moment, we’re reading The Silver Chair, the sixth book in the Narnia series. Reading time is normally between ten and fifteen minutes.

This relates to a principle that I believe in very strongly, whether it is applied to my own personal development or to educating the children: doing a small amount of something regularly stacks up and becomes monumental over time…if one commits to it. Since the beginning of last year, we’ve read three large volumes of The Story of the World and we’re well into the fourth and final one. Since the beginning of this year, we’ve read two and half of the Narnia books. Things get done if you do them regularly, even in small amounts. Lorna was speaking to me the other day about a principle from Charlotte Mason, who made this same point about children’s education: children cannot learn that much all at once because they need to be attentive and interested. This is why double-maths never works. They need short, regular sessions which are not too heavy and which leave them feeling like they want more. They will retain the information and experience a lot better and be more enthusiastic about coming back if it is approached in this way.

We’ve also made a recent change to our morning routine that I should have thought of a lot earlier. I was doing piano with them in the evening after dinner, but I was really finding it excruciating and so were the children. We were truly suffering. So we’ve now switched to doing a really small amount of piano in the morning. I am talking between three and five minutes at the moment although this may build up slightly. That might sound like not very much but (a) we’re actually doing it and making progress (b) we’re not really tired and having arguments with each other and (c) at the end of the day, when nobody is feeling like it, we don’t have to trudge through a deeply unenjoyable piano time. (c) here relates to the principle of delayed gratification I spoke about above. I saw that we were leaving something unenjoyable till the last minute when we should be winding down for the day and looking forward to a relaxing evening and bedtime. Much better to get it done, and then it all works properly.

So, anyway, after breakfast, piano with Rupert and Mary whilst Lorna teaches Rafe to read. I just get Mary to play the keys from C to A and I mark them on with a pen then she plays the ones I’ve written on. Rupert is learning basic pieces. Then I shower, get changed and get all the children changed. Lorna gets ready. Then I do piano with Rafe. And then (hopefully) by that point it’s about 9am and I can go about my business, which involves heading to my office to begin work, going to church for a service or going out for some other work related reason. And that’s my morning.

One important principle which I try and stick to for the morning: no social media, no emails and (most of the time anyway) no podcasts. I try and retain the information from the book I’ve been reading and think about that during my workout and whilst I’m making breakfast if I’m not talking to the children. This doesn’t always work and sounds more impressive than it is probably. But I find that anything from the internet in the morning is not good. It fragments the attention from an early point and habituates you into that mindset for the rest of the day. Practising focus and concentration in the morning tends to lead to better results more generally. So no internet. Sometimes I listen to Classic FM whilst making breakfast, turning it down for the adverts and the news and instructing the children as to why I do that (they are trying to inflame materialistic desire in our hearts to make us buy things that we don’t need, news is mostly untrustworthy propaganda which we don’t want to fill our heads with first thing in the morning, etc).

Again, this is all an ideal. Not every morning is like this. There are frequently arguments, setbacks, toilet incidents, slips in self-discipline, and a host of other things that can derail things massively. But something like this is what I aim for every day with the exception of my day off. And, on the whole, it’s working well.

Morning fun: Rupert and Mary dressed as pirates at about 7am.

Strong Feelings: The Lockdown Files

It’s always good to pay attention to strong reactions that we have to things. It is usually an opportunity to learn something about ourselves. This blog has served that function for me a lot since I started it. In fact, so much so that I hardly write in my paper diary anymore. I had a strong reaction to something this week, and I’d like to take a moment to try and articulate why.

I’m sure you’ve seen the so-called “Lockdown Files” by now. The WhatsApp messages from Matt Hancock’s phone released to the press by his biographer Isabelle Oakeshott which give an insight into the haphazard and unethical way that communications were pursued and decisions made during the Covid situation. It’s not the files that produced the reaction in me. It is a particular kind of response to the files that I find very difficult.

The response goes something like this: This whole thing is a sham. These files aren’t even real and they’ve been released at this time to “distract” the public from something else. That something else is of course the global plot by the WEF and other interested parties to depopulate the earth, and subject the world to a kind of slavery in which we are all tethered to a digital social-credit system, herded into densely populated supercities so that we can be ubiquitously monitored, forced to eat bugs, banned from driving cars, and various other nasty things.

Now, the World Economic Forum clearly want a lot of these things to happen, and this is just a matter of documentary fact. It’s on their website. You can watch their videos. (Even the stuff about depopulation is not at all hidden, shocking as this might sound.) They are fanatics and it is crazy that real politicians actually go to Davos to join in with this stuff. Since they have these ties to real politicians, they obviously have influence. And you can see this in the way that, for example, the Dutch government are trying to steal their farmers’ land ostensibly in order to reduce Nitrogen emissions, but in reality because they want to build some kind of densely-populated high-surveillance super-city in that area. (Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister again, has very close ties to the WEF, and the founder of the latter, Klaus Schwab, has praised him in quite bizarre ways in public, referring to him as the best looking of the major world leaders if my memory serves.)

What I have a problem with is going from that set of (I think quite reasonable) observations to the view that all of the western world’s media is totally controlled and micro-managed by the global cabal that is pulling the strings and that literally everything that we’re told is part of a carefully calculated psychological operation to manipulate us into not realising what they’re doing so that they can do it to us.

And the problem I have with this line is not only the line, but the response that comes when anyone casts doubt on it. That response is, to varying degrees, that one is naive and doesn’t really understand what’s going on or that one is, in some sense, actually part of the conspiracy or even might be “controlled opposition”.

The thing I find so irritating about this is the false and awkward dilemma it puts you in: either you are some kind of naive shill who is complicit with the global plot or you have to believe that everything from mainstream sources is absolutely contrived and totally misleading. But I am neither of those things. I think reality is more complicated than that and that some things (actually most things) in the media are false and unreliable and that other things are genuine. And sorting those things out from each other is very difficult. On the whole, I don’t trust the mainstream media, don’t read it or watch it and I’m not interested in it because I think it’s not a good source of information. But saying that doesn’t commit me to the view that it is all part of some carefully collated conspiracy to micromanage the public’s perceptions in the way that is being implied.

The other thing I find frustrating about this is that it can’t be disproven. Any evidence that comes to light can simply be dismissed as part of the psy-op. Thus, when tens of thousands of intra-governmental messages are released which essentially reveal the sham that was the entire lockdown, which will inevitably turn the public against what happened and make it less likely that future lockdowns will occur, even this must be interpreted as part of the global plot.

But, hang on a second, I thought that the lockdown was part of the global plot in the first place?

Well, it was then, but now the global plot has moved on to something else.

So, now they want us to be against lockdowns? Why?

Ah, you just don’t understand the reality of the situation. You’re still in The Matrix, in Plato’s Cave, in the realm of untruth. You need to wake.

But I’m not in any of those places, I assure you!

Yes you are.

And so on. I don’t know. I just find it exasperating. It seems to me that this is a good turn of events. What has been revealed is what many people have known to be true for a very long time, what we weren’t allowed to say because it was deemed contrary to the safety and health of the public: that the people who put the Covid lockdown together are unprincipled careerists who were terrified into the lockdown because they were covering their own backsides, that Matt Hancock is a petty hypocritical tyrant on an ego trip who was breaking his own laws and would do anything to get out of facing up to the consequences. And so on.

Well, anyway, this has been a long post, and if you’ve made it to the end, then I really appreciate both your subscription and attention. Until next time…