Let time do the work
The one weird trick that cured my procrastination
Something happens when I write this newsletter. One day, I barf out a bunch of semi-coherent words and only tangentially connected ideas. Then I walk away, ideally for at least 24 hours, and sometimes a lot more. When I come back, many of the words make a lot more sense, and the connections between the ideas have materialized. Whatever still seems bad about the draft also seems much easier to fix than I initially feared.
This is not a creativity revelation; “leave time between writing and editing” is writing advice you can find anywhere. But I’ve come to think of it with a slightly different texture. Not “take a break,” with its patronizing pat-on-the-head energy. Instead, I think about it as letting time do the work.
I first started thinking about time having a job during my sourdough baking phase, which started in 2021 and lasted about a year, as I desperately tried to keep inside interesting. I quickly realized my role in sourdough baking wasn’t to coax the starter or the dough into doing what I wanted it to do. Instead, my job was to intervene at the right moments.
Writing is the same. Drafts come to life on their own (often frustrating) timeline. Thinking I could wrest them onto my schedule only ever led to procrastination, because some part of me knew it was a doomed effort. I procrastinated not because I didn’t know how to start, but because I didn’t know how to finish.
Now, slowly, and still driven by plenty of panic, I’m learning that time is a non-negotiable part of the process. Quickly getting a few underdeveloped ideas onto the page to kick things off is crucial, but the trick is not to write as fast as I can. It’s to walk away as soon as I can.
My cure for procrastination? Start earlier (lol), but with so much less than I want to—so much less that writing down any of it feels pointless. Put that starter in a bowl with some flour and water, and leave it alone. If I’m hanging around, insisting and obsessing, all I’m doing is getting in the way.
