Using Procrastination To Your Advantage – A Ramble

Well, I thought that I’d talk very briefly about procrastination. This was something I ended up thinking about after experiencing some writer’s block when I was going to prepare today’s article.

I found myself staring at the screen and thinking “I should write something”, but didn’t really have the enthusiasm or inspiration.

Naturally, my mind wandered a bit and I found myself thinking “I could do something else creative instead”. It seemed better than just staring at a blank page.

Then, to my absolute delight, I had the first moment of actual artistic inspiration that I’d had for at least a couple of days. Yes, I’d still kept grinding along with my daily art practice regardless, but I suddenly found myself feeling enthusiastic about making art again 🙂

And, after discarding the initial idea I had for a digitally-edited painting, a better – and sillier – idea suddenly appeared in my mind.

Here’s a preview of the utterly bizarre 1960s/1990s-style artwork that I made:

The full digitally-edited painting should be posted here in mid-late December.

Anyway, the point of all of this is that procrastination can actually be a good thing when you use it correctly. If something seems to make you feel ridiculously unenthusiastic, then you might find it easier to feel enthusiasm for other things instead. This enthusiasm can be used in productive ways, which can also have interesting effects too.

I mean, one of the inspirations for the painting was some random nostalgia montage videos (titled “Remember 1999”, “Remember 2002” etc...) which I’d randomly been watching on Youtube whilst procrastinating from answering e-mails and stuff like that. And making the painting inspired this rambling article. Bizarrely, procrastination can actually be useful sometimes.

Ok, procrastination can sometimes be more useless or annoying than anything. I mean, between writing the previous paragraph and this one, I got completely de-railed by a 12-minute “Remember 2000” nostalgia montage video. Still, when used more deliberately, it can occasionally be genuinely useful.

Again, if the thing that you have to do seems ultra-boring, then everything else will seem more interesting in comparison. Use that enthusiasm to your advantage!

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂