Writer's block, an owner's guide: Thoughts on procrastination
Just a quick note to say that the author of Today I Write is alive. I’m busy with the important and urgent psychotherapy project I mentioned. I am not writing. Working on my writing projects at this time would be a way of procrastinating. It would be a kind of block.
But by the way, while we’re talking:
Decades ago when I was getting my first taste of working for someone else, the only management book I owned was Robert Townsend’s Up The Organization. I read it obsessively, a window into another life. I used to know pretty much every word, without knowing what most of the sentences meant (it was written in colloquial American by a senior businessman, and I was an immature serious 20-year-old in Edinburgh).
Today I got my hands on a copy of the book again, planning to share a particular passage with you. And I can’t find that passage. Maybe I simply haven’t found it yet, maybe I misremembered what book I read it in, or maybe it was edited out of the edition I have here (”brought up to date for the 1980s”).
Anyway, the advice I wanted to pass on was that every morning, when you get to work, you should think about what is the thing you least want to do that day. “Chances are,” says Townsend or whoever it was, in my memory, “that’s your priority for the day.”
I still believe that. Once we make the difficult phone call, or whatever it is, the day becomes brighter, and tomorrow becomes brighter too. You know what I’m talking about.
Published on June 6, 2005 at 11:06 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/thoughts-on-procrastination.html
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