Before I get onto the main point of this blog post, I really recommend watching this YouTube video about procrastination. (Yes, I mean that all irony aside.)

I agree with the conclusions of the video – that there are no such people as non-procrastinators, and that procrastination falls into two main types: short term (in which there are set deadlines) and indefinite (in which there are not).

I suffer from the latter.

Now, that isn’t exactly news to me, but what has changed is my approach to the issue. 

Y’know how the guy marked out a series of little circles signifying weeks in a person’s life? That doesn’t cut it for me. In fact, that’s pretty much anxiety incarnate, and therefore totally counterproductive to working through my procrastination.

I’m a planner. There’s nothing I love more than to sit down and map out exactly what I’m going to do for the next two years of my life. That in itself is actually a procrastination tool. And when it fails to work? I sit down and make out an amended plan. You see the problem.

So, the conclusion I’ve come to is this: I do need a plan, but it needs to be a short term one. There’s no point making big sweeping statements to myself about how much work I’m going to get done this year.

Going forward, I’m going to be writing a monthly blog post specifically detailing what writing I’ve done within said month. Then, in the same post, I’m going to set myself a goal for the following month. It’s simple in theory, so hopefully it shouldn’t be too hard to enact.

I already post monthly reading updates, and I’m convinced they’re helping me to read more. The fact that I’m accountable to the internet kind of helps.

All that said, it’s probably important that I outline where I’m currently at, so it’s easier to track how I’m going from here on out. This month, I’m doing Camp NaNoWriMo (a smaller scale version of National Novel Writing Month).

The target that I’ve set myself for April is a total of seventeen thousand words across all projects (that is, fan fiction, poetry, original fiction, and indeed blog posts). Of that target, I’m about one thousand, five hundred words in.

I’ve also recently started an email writing accountability/feedback group.

Let’s see how that goes.

To infinity and beyond, as they say.