Procrastinating and how to stop.

Sometimes, a lot of the time, I sit here and think to myself “I really ought to write something”. I often procrastinate, looking to my phone and my computer and my tablet and my TV to fill in the gap. Most of the time that’s what ends up happening and nothing ends up getting done. Where I grew up, I had placed a sticker on the monitor of my computer to warn future me of its deadly traps. The sticker read “This machine is the ENEMY of creativity”. It felt fitting at the time.

 

Even writing this the urge to pick up the phone, to dive into the stream of endless somethings that the world has to offer, is difficult to ignore.

 

But there are ways around it, little tricks to avoid the mind biting in one hundred different directions. Focussing on what you actually enjoy rather than what dopamine-sapping content is served to you on the socials is a start. To read a favourite book, sit down and properly pay attention to a good movie, listen to an album that has escaped your rotation for a while. This will regenerate a part of you lost to fatigue. With that, the will to do returns, the will to write and share.

 

A particular book inspired this surge in me. Prophetically titled DO INTERESTING, the book is a little guide of sorts on how to be, or do, interesting. Unlike how it may initially sound, it isn’t really a one-stop-shop guide for how to have great charisma for parties. It is more about how to be interesting, rather than just seem interesting. The contents are split into three sections: Notice, Collect, and Share. These clusters act as the tenets for how to be engaged (maybe a better word than interesting) and how to put that newly received energy into practice.

 

As an amateur writer and all-round fan of weirdo uniqueness, each principle described felt like a little precipitation of a eureka moment to culminate in a rejuvenation from the January slump. The first third simply asks you to notice the world around you, all the while suggesting small activities or tasks to undertake to make that noticing a little bit more of a considered process. It’s always little things like write things down, organise a small aspect of your life, or photograph the changes in your environment. It is, however, a degree of noticing that is often eliminated from our lives through the constant plugged in-ness.

 

Of course, this shift in focus leads to the second section: Collect. Once again, the book asks for you to simply collect, in one way or another, the things you liked from your observations. What is it that particularly interests you about the world and how can these interests be seen to overlap? I think this is a great way to understand yourself: in the age of constant consumerism, we can at least find solace in being defined by what we choose to curate in our lives.

 

Now that we have recognised what collections we love in life, we must share, as the final chapter of the book suggests. We must put to actions whatever we have learned about ourselves. What lays before you is my version of that, with the book itself maybe being part of my own collection, itself within a wider collection of things. Things made with intent. Design created with human satisfaction in mind. Maybe that doesn’t really mean anything, but it’s the closest I can come to defining an umbrella term for what I strive to collect. Yours may be the similar, even could be the same. But I doubt it. We all search to curate something in our lives to make sense of what’s around us. I suppose this is our consumerist fingerprint, an identifying mark of what makes you you.

 

Paradoxically, it’s hard to imagine a world where this sentiment reigns supreme but also impossible to imagine one where it isn’t present. Despite the billions of useless things vying for our attention, we choose to take the path of most resistance. Maybe even reading this is a step down that path.