Writers and Creators, Stop Worrying About Procrastinating and Learn to Love the Deadline

Image credit: Unsplash; NeONBRAND @neonbrand

From newbies to seasoned professionals, we’ve all submitted at 11:59 to meet a midnight deadline. Worse, no matter what we promise ourselves, that seems to be the norm not the exception. Who hasn’t thought: Why do I do this to myself? What is wrong with me?

The good news: nothing is wrong with you. Procrastinating is not the problem. Procrastinating is necessary to the creative process. It may feel like you’re not doing anything but in fact, you are gestating. “To see procrastination as undesirable, especially in the initial stages of an endeavor is to say…that a woman feeling her first birth pangs should simply get on with it…. What looks from the outside like our delay; our lack of commitment; even our laziness may have more to do with a slow, necessary ripening through time and the central struggle with the realities of any endeavor to which we have set our minds.”[1] David Whyte

Beautiful. But you know how procrastinating takes on a life of its own. What makes us actually deliver the baby? A deadline. As Duke Ellington said, “I don’t need time. I need a deadline.”

Procrastinating plus a deadline equals you getting the first draft of your masterpiece written. Really. You’ll probably—make that definitely—think that first draft is no good, it sucks, it needs a ton of work. So what. Be proud of your newborn and love it. Give it a chance. Only Athena sprang full grown from her father Zues’s forehead. 

The bad news: you can’t torture yourself about procrastinating anymore. Or, for meeting your deadline at the last second. Wait, I take that back: you can. Up to you.

What is it about a deadline that makes us stop procrastinating and start writing? And finish?  Brain science provides clues. Keep reading if that interests you. But if not, no worries.  

You don’t have to understand what’s driving the premise to test it. Here’s the drill.

Expect to procrastinate, so don’t worry about that. To make yourself actually write, impose a hard deadline, one you are committed to keeping. There are two phases: creating the first draft, then revising it. “Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.”[2] Sister Corita Kent

To create the first draft, I use an old-fashioned kitchen timer set for 25 minutes and hand write. Why hand write? No delete button. I put one word down after the other without allowing myself to double back, rethink, or “correct” anything. If I’m not “done” when the timer goes off, I set it for another 25 minutes. I keep going until somehow, I “know” I’m “done” with that final ding.

As for endlessly revising and tweaking, a hard submission deadline is the way to go. If you have a steady writing gig, kudos. It’s nice to have an outside demand to meet. I don’t have a column (yet) though I do blog. Because being accountable to others always works for me, I tell myself that my blog subscribers expect me to give them something to read. No, they don’t. Nobody cares, my Inner Critic inevitably declares. I mostly ignore that.

It’s easy to keep moving your deadline forward. But you know what that is? More procrastinating! As the 12-steppers say about kicking a bad habit: relapse is part of recovery. Set another deadline and tolerate the stress of meeting it. “Persistence is the great talent.” Octavia Butler

And now for a little brain science.

The brain is made up of two cerebral hemispheres, right and left, that are connected across the midline. “Split brain” studies of people whose hemispheres have been surgically separated to treat intractable seizures have taught us two things. One, each side, independent of the other, can do all a person needs to live in the world (with the exception of speech, which is a function of the left side only). Two, it appears that the two hemispheres differ profoundly in mode of functioning, strengths and limitations, and world-view.

The right side’s focus is broad. Widely networked throughout both hemispheres, it uses bodily sensation (visual, auditory, touch, taste, smell) to process experience, and thinks in images, not language. It is comfortable with uncertainty and the unknown because it interfaces directly with the external environment, i.e. the new.  

The left side’s focus is narrow. It is heavily interconnected within itself, less so globally. This facilitates its primary strength—narrow focus—but it also reflects on a neural level the self-referring nature of its operations. It deals only with what it already knows, i.e. the past, and the world it has made for itself.  

The right side processes time without a break in continuity, as an ongoing narrative. It’s the side that generates all the narrative structures we present to the outside world—stories, drawings, dances, songs—without being formally taught how to make them. Somehow, it “knows” what to do, and does it, without “conscious” intent. Classic examples include the way children draw without a plan and make up stories, i.e. narrative arcs, on demand. 

The left catalogs time as a series of disconnected, static points which means it cannot follow, or generate, a narrative arc. It is analytic, critical and logical and uses language to process sensory input that the right side delivers to it. It is self-conscious, bossy, a doom-and-gloomer resistant to change, and the source of that loud and nasty inner voice creative people call The Critic.

Putting It Together

When writing an essay (or composing a piece of music, or setting up a scientific study, or bringing forth anything new) the right side creates the raw first draft and the left then revises, edits and polishes it. That revision process (left brain) may spark a new idea (right brain), which then needs modification (left brain), which sparks another idea (right brain), and so on. When the two hemispheres dance together this way, a state called flow[3] occurs which is associated with a profound sense of wellbeing and aliveness. (That’s why we keep writing, right?)

But let’s get real. Writing a first draft is risky.  The right side delivers mushy words and murky ideas on first pass, which makes us vulnerable to The Critic’s harsh verbal put-downs. The left side always criticizes new work because what it doesn’t recognize from past experience, it rejects.  This tension is part of what fuels procrastinating. However, while risky and anxiety provoking, only actually writing prevents stagnation. The impending deadline somehow empowers the right brain to commit and deliver despite the left’s nay-saying. 

Remember this the next time you find yourself scrambling to meet a deadline, exasperated that you didn’t start sooner. Let that go—at least, consider it—and take heart. This is the process. Embrace it. “No doubt, the universe is unfolding as it should.”[4] Max Ehrmann

[1] David Whyte, Consolations: the Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

[2] Sister Corita Kent, popularized by John Cage, Some Rules for Students and Teachers

[3] Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Flow, The Pyschology of Optimal Experience 

[4] Max Ehrmann, Disiderata

I followed my own writing advice to get this baby written. Available on Amazon and online B& N.