Over the summer, my life as a professor looks very different from the way it looks during the academic year. Sometimes summer looks like a break–I don’t get up and go to work every day, though I do go to campus for occasional meetings or work commitments. Sometimes it even feels a like a break. But most of the time, I’m still working: teaching online summer school classes, planning the classes I’ll teach in the fall, and of course doing lots of writing, both for this blog and for other projects.
Writing is one of those things that changes every time you do it. The process you follow for one project will almost definitely not be the process you follow for the next. I know this for a fact. And yet, this summer, I have found myself fighting off the impulse to self-sabotage. Almost every day, it seems, I’ve had to convince myself not to give up on whatever I was doing. It’s hard to face the fact that, even after 30 years as a professional writer, I still struggle with the writing process.
Self-sabotage isn’t unique to writers, of course. Do you recognize any of these self-sabotage techniques?
Procrastination
If you just wait long enough, perhaps the struggle you’re dealing with will resolve itself. You’ll devote yourself to completing the task one day and, magically, all the roadblocks you’ve been facing will have disappeared. In my particular case, waiting long enough would put me at the end of the summer, after which I’d have the very convenient “other things that have to get done right now” to explain my lack of writing. (When my kids were small, they were an excellent excuse for procrastination.)
False Prioritization
Although writing was at the top of my To Do list all summer, I found myself doing other things quite often—things like going to the grocery store or the gym—because those things were so much easier than writing. I go, I do what I need to do, I’m done. Success! Getting things done feels good, and these things are also easily justifiable. I have to eat. Exercise is good for me. When it comes to writing—honestly, who cares if I write another blog post?
Which brings me to the most insidious self-sabotage technique . . .
Pseudo-compassion
Self-sabotage quite often appears under the guise of thoughts like “Maybe it’s time to give yourself a break and let go of this project,” or “Obviously, you’re struggling with this because there’s something else you should be working on right now.” Starting new projects and never finishing one of them is a common sign of self-sabotage. Pseudo-compassion is often at its root. And, while there are certainly times when you need to give yourself a break–and there are priorities in all our lives that are non-negotiable—the fact that you’re struggling to get something done usually isn’t a good enough reason to back away.
Sadly, there is no magic cure for self-sabotage. All you can do is recognize it when you see it and do your best to turn it around.
How?
Set new goals.
I started my summer with a pages-per-week goal that became unworkable when I realized that re-writing what I had already put together was a priority. But getting farther and farther behind on that page goal led me to avoid spending any time at the computer. So I changed my goal, shooting for hours-per-day engaged with writing. All I had to do was sit at the computer for the allotted amount of time. It didn’t matter what I was working on–as long as I was present and focused for a set amount of time, I’d met my goal.
Schedule your first priority last.
While it might seem like common sense to put your top priority first, I put together a daily schedule that let me do things like grocery shopping early in the day. In other words, I gave myself permission to procrastinate, thereby eliminating the opportunity to do so later. If both grocery shopping and writing time were on my schedule, each in their appointed slot, I could see that there was plenty of time for both. Same for a trip to the gym.
As for pseudo-compassion? It’s a tricky devil, because it sounds like being kind to yourself. The best remedy might simply be to ask yourself whether those compassionate statements are accurate. Then listen to your heart, because it almost always knows whether or not you’re telling yourself the truth.
If you find yourself struggling with self-sabotage, remember that you’re the one in charge of the way you spend your time. You’re also the source of that voice inside your head. Much of my first novel was written in the two-hour block between dinner and bath time every evening. I’ll just have to keep reminding myself that if I could do that, anything is possible.
For more helpful information about avoiding self-sabotage, check out this article.
2 Comments
Good point! I tend to write in two-hour blocks, almost as though my brain has a timer and just shuts off after that much time has passed. Right now, I try to get in a two-hour block in the morning and another in the afternoon. And I’m a HUGE believer in the role of the unconscious. Yesterday I was struggling with a character’s motivation for a crucial act that forms the novel’s structure, and this morning it miraculously became clear to me. I’ve never really believed in “writer’s block”–when you can’t produce new material, it’s because you’re not done thinking about it yet. I just have to remind myself of this fact, over and over again.
I got some very good advice when I was on fellowship while writing my dissertation that might parallel the great advice you’ve given here. When given the gift of time to concentrate on your writing without having to worry about other professional responsibilities, some people think that they have to commit all of the time they would have spent on those other responsibilities to writing – that writing should be an eight-hour commitment on the model of an eight-hour work day. But no one can write for eight hours a day and sustain that effort. Writing is some of the most intense intellectual work any of us ever do, and we really need to recognize that a couple or a few hours of writing is probably what most of us can manage before the effort becomes counter-productive. This advice gave me permission to value other kinds of work that contributes to writing – research, revising, interacting with other writers to help them hone their — and my — craft. Oh, and letting my unconscious work out some of the kinks in that paragraph that isn’t working like I want it to while I sip some tea, pet the cat, and watch Netflix.