Procrastination

It's been a while, over two months, since I last sat down and published a blog post. Originally, some time at the back end of a last year, when I created this blog my idea was to write an entry once or twice week. There are several reasons I have failed to do this; lack of time being a perennial problem, although strictly speaking it is not lack of time but the writing of blog entries being too low a priority for me to get them done. I have a wife, two kids, a full time job, an old house that needs work doing to it, a garden that is larger than I can easily cope with, extended family that live a fair distance away from me (a long day's round trip to see them) etc. but I do have spare time, it's just that I tend to spend it playing role playing games or drinking beer (both I am coming to realise I do to de-stress from my day to day life). However, one thing I that I have suddenly realised I have a real problem with is procrastination. It took me listening to The psychology of motivation and procrastination for this realisation to finally hit home. And looking back on my life it's become obvious to me that on and off and to varying degrees, sometimes chronically, I've suffered from this right back to school. So what is procrastination?

Procrastination is the avoidance of doing a task that needs to be accomplished by a certain deadline. It could be further stated as a habitual or intentional delay of starting or finishing a task despite knowing it might have negative consequences.

So I've decided to do something about this. I've started by making a list of the things I want to accomplish. Within this blog entry I'll keep it to RPG related tasks (although I'm applying it outside of RPGs too) as this blog is for RPG stuff.

1. Level up my D&D 5e character for tomorrow's session
2. Write up my RQG scenario, Bye Tore & The Snow Dog
3. Create & write up my Dragonquest scenario
4. Read up Cthulhu 3e and A Green & Pleasant Land & my old CoC scenarios
5. Develop my Wilderlands campaign 

To aid me deal with my procrastination I've sorted out a place where I feel happy working. One of the non RPG tasks I've kick started recently is clearing out my old office as we intend to extend our tiny bathroom into it. So I've relocated my computer desk into the our house's "box" room which previous was used as our boys play room. This has allowed me to dust, clean & reorganise the desk and make it a more pleasant place to work at. This appears to be working as I'm writing this blog entry!

I also intend to set aside some time as often as possible to sit down and work through the tasks I have identified as priorities. I'm going to try and do this shortly after I get home from work each day, around 16:00 and just spend as long as is practical on the task; the important thing being to keep momentum going.

Listening to Che Webster's excellent Roleplay Rescue has helped me make a few decisions to help deal with my procrastination as Che covers things like motivation within his podcasts. I can heartily recommend listening to them.