"The starting point for understanding why you procrastinate is to treat yourself with enough respect to assume that behind your inactivity lies an excellent, if not immediately apparent reason. And this reason is to be found in an altogether different attitude or trait inside yourself that precipitated your procrastinating reaction...
What is [it] a reaction to? What is the unknown factor that provokes such a highly visible and aggravating response? The nature of the invisible stimulus can be partly deduced from the extremely emotional and hostile nature of the reaction. For however much you may want to see it as a kind of passive paralysis, procrastination ... is a very aggressive act: it is a pushing away, a rejection.
Tragically, this stubborn rebellion by the unconscious usually triggers even more severe and desperate measures from you, its hapless guardian, to impose a strict regimen of work: total isolation, twelve-hour days, endless changes of locale and paraphanelia. But it is all for nothing. Attempts to be ruthless with yourself in order to 'overcome procrastination' must always lead directly back to the hated condition itself, thereby engendering stalemate. Under these highly sensitized conditions even a reasonable order, as long as it is an order, will be rejected. The sense of failure and frustration increases exponentially as the vicious circle clicks back into gear.
People who accuse themselves of procrastination are not procrastinators. They are accusers. Far from being lazy, they are driven by such extremes of self-distrust and compulsive overcontrol that they throttle the spontaneous contact with self that all creative activity requires." -- Victoria Nelson, "Writer's Block"
What is [it] a reaction to? What is the unknown factor that provokes such a highly visible and aggravating response? The nature of the invisible stimulus can be partly deduced from the extremely emotional and hostile nature of the reaction. For however much you may want to see it as a kind of passive paralysis, procrastination ... is a very aggressive act: it is a pushing away, a rejection.
Tragically, this stubborn rebellion by the unconscious usually triggers even more severe and desperate measures from you, its hapless guardian, to impose a strict regimen of work: total isolation, twelve-hour days, endless changes of locale and paraphanelia. But it is all for nothing. Attempts to be ruthless with yourself in order to 'overcome procrastination' must always lead directly back to the hated condition itself, thereby engendering stalemate. Under these highly sensitized conditions even a reasonable order, as long as it is an order, will be rejected. The sense of failure and frustration increases exponentially as the vicious circle clicks back into gear.
People who accuse themselves of procrastination are not procrastinators. They are accusers. Far from being lazy, they are driven by such extremes of self-distrust and compulsive overcontrol that they throttle the spontaneous contact with self that all creative activity requires." -- Victoria Nelson, "Writer's Block"