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Nat Locke: I’ve finally figured out how to use my tendency to procrastinate to my advantage

Nat Locke STM
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Nat Locke.
Camera IconNat Locke. Credit: Ian Munro/The West Australian

Look, I’m not the sort of person who would use Google to diagnose themselves. Hahaha. Of course I am. It’s basically human nature.

However, I’m more the kind of person who uses Google to diagnose themselves, then boldly proclaims that Google (and therefore many medical experts) are wrong.

You see, in avoiding doing something that I was supposed to be doing, I spent some quality time googling procrastination. Yes, I see the irony, don’t worry. It turns out that procrastination is a symptom of ADHD and so I spent the next two hours proving to myself that I don’t have ADHD, which is a behaviour that may in fact confirm the diagnosis.

Oh dear.

Firstly, there is no judgment of ADHD here. I know several people who have it — that is, they’ve been diagnosed by actual living medical professionals — and manage it in a variety of ways, from medication to just living with it by building skills around it. And they’re all doing a great job.

But it turns out that procrastination was pretty much my only real symptom. Oh, and starting projects and not finishing them, but I had always put that down to being an Aries. I have started so many different hobbies and crafts, then moved on as soon as I achieved a reasonable degree of mastery. I have no desire to do the same thing forever and ever, because there are just so many other skills that I could be acquiring.

These days, though, I like to think I’ve figured out how to use procrastination to my advantage. The trick is to use the time and energy you’re expending avoiding doing something and redirect them into something useful.

Like, in order to avoid a particular task this week, I finally fixed the curtains in two different rooms in my house. One had jammed because the little dooverlackie (it’s a technical term) that the fabric attaches to had bent, and the other had popped off its bracket.

Nothing made me feel more superior than dragging the ladder in from the garage, clambering to the top of it and wrestling the offending hardware back into position. It was a job I had been meaning to do for several months and if I hadn’t been avoiding doing something else, I never would’ve gotten around to it this time either.

Like all great life skills, I really honed this one at university. I was never so house-proud or productive as I was during the study week before exams. Faced with the mountains of cramming required, I would clean my room from top to bottom. Once I even sanded back my desk to stain it a slightly different colour, because I couldn’t face the idea of studying at it in the state it was in. I drew up extensive, colour-coordinated study timetables that accounted for every waking moment, and allotted the perfect amount of time to each subject I was studying. Except for the fact that I was never able to stick to it, so like an EasyJet timetable, I was running late from the get-go.

To aid in my streamlined and efficient way of life, I also factored in every meal and exactly what I would eat, so I wouldn’t have to think about it. This wasn’t exactly an amazing feat, considering most of my meals consisted of two-minute noodles — the generic sort, not the brand you’ve heard of — with a small can of corn stirred through it. But still, onto the schedule it went.

Actually, writing a schedule is something that I still do to this day. Last weekend when I had four days at my disposal (thanks annual leave), I set myself a daily list of tasks to do, mostly just so I could soak up the joy of crossing them off. Walk the dog, for example. I mean, I do that three times a day, every day, but it’s still very satisfying to draw a big line through it. There’s a real sense of achievement.

My other trick to actually getting something done is to set myself a timer. If I need to clean the bathroom, for example, I set a timer for 20 minutes and go hell for leather. I can do anything for 20 minutes, even something as unpleasant as cleaning the bathroom. Putting a limit on it helps my brain to deal with the immensity of the task, and generally even if the timer goes off, I’ll tend to finish the job because after 20 minutes of frantic scrubbing, I’m usually close to the end anyway.

And you can rest assured that if I’m finding a novel way to clean the bathroom, it’s because I’m avoiding something REALLY unpleasant. Still, the shower screen is gleaming.

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