“I have discovered that there is one main reason why we procrastinate: it rewards us with temporary relief from stress.” Neil Fiore, author of The Now Habit and other books. I quote from him fairly extensively in my own book. (See sidebar for ordering information.) Last week I posted about the mistaken idea that you have to get motivated before you get to work; that you have to feel a certain way first. So did the runner in the picture ask herself if she really felt like running through the snow? If she had, she probably would have stayed by the fire drinking hot chocolate. She would have avoided the stress of the cold . . .
and the effort. It’s always so much easier to sink back onto the couch than it is to go put on those running shoes.
This is the start of a pretty stressful week for me: concert week. (Do you have your tickets yet? If not, go to the Cherry Creek Chorale’s “buy tickets” page.) We’ll have two rehearsals this week instead of the usual one, there’ll be the reception on Friday night for which I’m in charge, and then there will be two more performances, since we’ve added one on Sunday afternoon. I’ll be making chocolate stout cupcakes (recipe to be posted over on the hospitality blog later this week), Parmesan-pepper biscotti, spicy cheddar cookies, and some kind of dip that approximates Welsh rarebit since our concert centers on Wales. (I haven’t been able to find much of anything for that last item and may have to just improvise something. Real Welsh rarebit, or “rabbit,” is a hot cheese sauce poured over bread, which we are not going to do for 400 people.) Puh-lenty of stress that I could avoid temporarily but which will rise up and bite me along about Friday afternoon.
So, to continue the discussion of the wisdom in The Antidote that I started last week, really productive people focus on work habits, not motivational ones. They don’t think that they have to be in a certain mood before they start working; they recognize that if they go ahead and start working they’ll probably get in the mood, and even if they don’t, they’ll still get work done. I’ve found it to be so helpful this past week to say to myself, “This is what you’re going to do whether you feel like it or not.” It’s not grim; it’s liberating. Just go ahead and do it! I feel as if I’ve stumbled onto a great secret to success here in the month of my 64th birthday. I know, I know–all pretty obvious, as are most of my brilliant insights. It’s not what you know, it’s what you do that counts.
BTW, I didn’t feature The Antidote as a book of the week even though I found some of its ideas so helpful because the second half of the book veers off into some pretty weird ideas, including that old chestnut about whether or not there really is a “self.” Or are we all just part of the flow? But I highly recommend the first four chapters.