Hi! Lori here, welcoming you to another episode of Real English Conversations from BetterAtEnglish.com. In today’s conversation, my friend Yvette returns to help me finish our earlier conversation about perfectionism and procrastination. This time we focus on the strategies that we’ve found helpful in our own battles with this debilitating problem. As always, you can find the vocabulary notes and full transcript of this podcast on our website, www.BetterAtEnglish.com.
OK, here we go!
Lori: Actually, there was one thing that I think in our last conversation about perfectionism and procrastination that we didn’t really cover…
Yvette: OK
Lori: …and that’s what you do to get out of the procrastination habit once you’ve identified that you have a problem with it. Like if you have any methods that you’ve used to help you over the fear of starting or working on whatever it is you’re supposed to be working on.
Yvette: [Laughs] You’re asking me?
Lori: Yeah, yeah we didn’t talk about that.
Yvette: How you actually get out of it? Wow…
Lori: If there’s anything you do…
Yvette: If you find out, let me know. I mean, that’s kind of tricky. Wow, that’s something to think about. Well, usually I start with a plan. You break it down and smaller bits…so… the way that I can do it sometimes is to just say, “There is…I need to do a task and let me just first open the file folder.” That’s my first step. Once I’ve got that opened up and I’ve got the file maybe even opened in my browser — whatever I needed to be in — then I can start working on it. But it really is just kicking my butt…giving myself a good kick and going, “Come on, you can do it today.” But I tend to just find 15 other things to do first, which is clear my desk…oh yeah, I need lunch…oh, I need to do to the — let me do the groceries right now instead of later, so I don’t get interrupted by that. Um, so I tried to get rid of things, but I don’t know, I try to plan it better, but that usually doesn’t work — for me anyway.
Lori: Uh huh. Well, it sounds to me, when you mention that, for example, if it’s a writing project, that you start by just opening the file….
Yvette: Yeah.
Lori: …to me that sounds like you’re breaking it down to something you know you can do that really doesn’t require any performance. I mean it’s not difficult to just open the file and look at it, but then at least you make that first step.
Yvette: Yeah, it’s…I do find though, that is the hardest step, that very first one. Once I’ve got that one, it pretty much moves on from there. Once I’ve got the file and I know what I’m looking at — and maybe part of that is that it’s a bit chaotic, especially as a writer I may have 15 drafts of a similar text, and I’m not even sure what the first one or the last one was that I used and which one I was in, and I try to make notes of this in a notebook that I keep specifically for that purpose, umm, but to know what part, what I should be working on, just that, identifying that helps. And then I can open that file in my word processor and start working, umm, and then it’s okay. And then it’s just a matter of not getting interrupted by anything or anybody.
Lori: Yeah, that’s really hard.
Yvette: Because once that interruption comes, then it’s very hard to go back to it.
Lori: Yeah, it takes you a while to get back into the flow once you’ve been interrupted.
Yvette: But it’s also kind of overcoming a sort of fear of not being able to do it. Umm, you know, when you want to start a task and you think, “Ah, I don’t know, it’s a big task; I’m not sure I can do it.” You know, to just get started and throw out the idea that it needs to be perfect, and that you know, any effort right now would be good. But by that time though, I’ve already procrastinated to a point of it almost not being possible anymore, or at least being way too late. You know what I mean? It’s like you’ve already kind of passed five deadlines at this point.
Lori: Yeah, mmm. I guess were coming round again to that idea that just getting started is often the hardest part, and by that I don’t mean like actually “started at the beginning of a project,” but maybe even when you’re working on it, like, getting started with your work period for the day, or whatever, that’s really hard.
Yvette: Yeah.
Lori: And I found, for me, there was actually a site on the Internet that had what they called a “procrastination hack“…
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