A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

Overcome procrastination:

I suppose procrastination is different for everyone, but for me, procrastination is more about performance anxiety than anything else. It has been crippling at times. I suppose that getting into comics in the 1980′s when women creators weren’t very welcome had a rather serious effect on my self-confidence, and no matter how many nice things are said about my work, there is always the little voice in the back of my head telling me to go work at McDonalds.

Every piece of blank paper is an enemy. Every deadline is terrifying. For someone who absolutely loved to draw and was winning awards for it from the age of five, performance anxiety is a learned behavior and like any learned behavior, it can be unlearned.

I went to great lengths to learn how to control the anxiety even going so far as to do one of those motivational fire-walk seminars where a stroll across a bed of hot coals was the graduation ceremony. All procrastination is linked to some kind of anxiety or discomfort. In other words, the pain of producing the work becomes greater and more real than the reward of doing the work. This can simply be knowing that you are working with a difficult creative team, or having a really tight deadline that makes the job unpleasant. Whatever, the trick is to learn how to make the pain of not doing the work more real than the pain of doing it.

I use a simple two-step process. First, I recreate the feelings and circumstances that enabled me to work at a time when work was pure pleasure. The best time for drawing and writing for me was when I was a kid in my room and I spent hours and hours working on my stories or drawing pictures simply for the fun of doing it. The work was not meant to be seen by anyone. It was just for me. I sat on my frilly canopy bed with a lapboard on my knees and worked for hours every single day and it was heaven. Whenever I hit a snag, I go right back there. I get away from the drawing board, I grab my lapboard and I go to my room. I put up the frilly pillows, put something silly into my DVD player, and get something to eat or drink that is bad for me. It takes me back to the time when I was a kid drawing for fun and it never fails to work for me.

If you are having a procrastination problem, try to visualize and imitate a time in your life when the work was going great. Then recreate that moment. It’s the same technique that athletes use and it really, really works. Try it for yourself. It might take a little practice to visualize, but you’re a creative person, so it should come to you eventually. Try to recreate the mood with some old music or even get something to eat that you used to like as a kid.

Second, try a technique called “The Dickens Model”. This is a great one for visualizing the consequences of bad habits and behaviors. Close your eyes and visualize what it is about your life that is not working. Think of the things you are doing that are working against your goals. Make a strong picture in your mind about it. Then think of how bad things are going to be in five years if you don’t change those behaviors. Give yourself a strong picture and be honest with yourself. Then picture the consequences of your behavior in ten years. Then in another fifteen. Pretty grim, hunh? Now, roll that mental image in your mind like a movie going backwards, until you are in the here and now. Then, carefully picture yourself changing those bad habits and self-defeating behaviors. Project that image ahead another five years. You’ve made some great changes and your life is much improved. Roll it ahead another ten years. Then fifteen. Now hold onto that positive image and take it back with you to the present. You now have a strong mental image of your life with two very different outcomes.

In the first picture, you never made the changes you should have made. In the second, you got your act together and you turned your life around. If the comparison between the two images doesn’t cure your procrastination, nothing will.

Delegate:

Learn to turn tasks over to others. If you’re a control freak like me, even letting someone else vacuum your floor is a major issue. If you’re not, this advice will not be any problem for you. The advice is simply to let other people take on some of your workload. Whatever is not essential to producing and creating, try to hand it off to others, either family members or someone that you hire.

There are a lot of things that you can delegate. For me, I broke down and hired my mother to be my assistant some years ago. She lives a half hour away, likes the work, and is very handy for doing things like spotting blacks and picking up the mail, little tasks like that can eat up hours every week. When money is very good, I use a maid service. For some reason, the maid cleans the house much faster and more efficiently than I do. I would spend the weekend getting the house together. She does it in about two hours and that is a big time and money saver, especially while I am on deadline.

My years self publishing convinced me that trying to do everything myself was not only impossible, it was going to kill me, so learning to let others do the ephemera freed me to do the important things like writing and drawing. The only warning is that hiring friends can be a problem, especially if some of your friends are fans that may not be as keen on respecting your privacy as they ought to be. Many pros have had books and art filched by fans they have let in their homes. Most fans are great people, but some are not. Be careful whom you let in your life.

UPDATE: Moving out to the country has removed a lot of the old temptations and distractions that made deadlines a problem.

While I griped in previous posts about buddies who could not take no for an answer and always showed up in the middle of the work day to hang out, they didn’t hold a gun to my head and drag me to Starbucks. I went to Starbucks because I was procrastinating. Then I hated myself afterward when I had to stay up until 2 AM every night trying to make up the time on my deadline.

It’s like trying to lose weight, mentioning that goal to a friend, and then having them show up with a box of chocolates for you. I have had several friends pull this number, and I wanted to knock them in the head.

Friends can sabotage your goals without having any malicious intent. They may have problems of their own they are dealing with. They may feel left out, or insecure that you may be going in directions they can’t follow. Friendships can end when one person is more successful than the other, not just because the achiever has become a snob, but because the person who can’t also reach their dream goal can’t be happy for you. If not, maybe you need to decide if they are really the kind of friends you should have in your life.

When you are struggling with a tough goal, it is TOO EASY to get distracted, and then to convince yourself that you DESERVE a break today when you have only been working two hours that morning. If you simply can’t say no to people, then cut yourself off from them until you don’t have to face them.

If you have disciplined friends or family you can rely on, tell them you MUST meet that deadline or you MUST face that drawing board, and ask them to please help you stick to your goal, maybe by popping their head in the studio to make sure you’re not zoned out watching a TV show. Get comfortable saying “NO.” and “I’m sorry, I have other plans.”

NEVER share this information with the person who buys you candy when you are on a diet, or the person who wants to distract you with an afternoon at the movies when your editor is breathing down your neck.

If you have to, ask your editor to call or email every single darned day and get an update on progress. Most will be happy to make sure you meet that deadline and if a five minute chat will give you that boost, then that is to everyone’s advantage.

I had to do this a couple of years ago when I had a very distracting personal problem that left me boo hoo-ing every day and unable to concentrate. My editor knew I was in serious distress, and was able to VERY kindly stay on my case so I could get my gig done. Only after the job was completed did I tell her what the problem was, and she was very understanding. And because she was a good editor, she helped walk me through a trying personal time, give me gentle daily reminders, and focus on the work, which also helped to get my mind off my personal problem, so good show all around.

Get leverage on yourself by surrounding yourself with people who SUPPORT your goals and who aid your disciplined habits. Avoid those who don’t until you have met those goals. That doesn’t make everyone who wants to hang out at Starbucks all day an evil person, but that does make them an influence you really don’t want around when you have to get a job done.

Some friends are foul weather friends who thrive on distress, chaos, and bad news. They get a boost out of seeing you anxious or worried. It makes them feel good that they can “help you out”, or listen to your problems.

But they can also feed your anxieties by allowing you to wallow in them. They enable you to be weak. If your friends KNOW that you are having a problem with your art, then the best friends know when to let you talk it through and when to let you work it through.

Foul weather friends usually flee when your life is going well, and are the first to be unhappy for your successes. You’ll find out who they are in short order.

Talking through your problems is very cathartic. Everyone needs that. HOWEVER, talk is not enough. You need to act on your problems. After an afternoon’s chat over coffee, you may feel your stress level go down because you’ve had a chance to air your worries. But then, you may no longer feel the push to ACT on the problem because you relieved the stress momentarily by talking about it.

And in the case of a deadline, if you are spending days every week hanging out with friends because you are avoiding the drawing board, then whatever deadline problem you just had got a hell of a lot worse.

Keep your goals clear by writing them down. Get leverage on yourself by making sure that you list the benefits and drawbacks of every action you need to take to make those goals. Be very clear about what it is you are doing and WHY you are doing it. And be very clear about what you will LOSE if you do not act to meet your goals.

And one great way to get leverage is by putting your goals on a public blog where everyone can see them and go NEENER NEENER if you don’t manage to do what you set out to do. I get NEENER NEENER a lot because everyone who is waiting for A Distant Soil sees me blogging and wonders why I am not drawing…even I can’t draw 24/7, folks…

As for delegating tasks, after writing the original article, I had a really bad experience related to hiring an old friend to help out. It is now long ago enough that I laugh, oh how I laugh, but at the time – geez. Every single thing I warned about in my post came true.

I’ve worked with other friends since with whom I have been very happy.

Win some, lose some.

My mom really doesn’t do much work for me these days, and I have stopped doing a lot of my mail order and rarely go to conventions. Cutting back on sidelines enables me to concentrate on producing more work, which I prefer. I still do a couple of shows a year. But I may decide to change things and expand in future, and if I ever find an assistant as good as my mom, I will not tell anyone because they will try to hire her away! Several companies tried to hire my mother at shows! Curse them for mom snatching!

Anyway, hope all this advice helps. Of course you don’t have to do everything I say, and I am sure you won’t. I am not coming to your house to check your sock drawer and make sure every one of your tootsie warmers is in color coordinated order.

It’s no skin off my nose if you don’t get your dream project finished. It’s entirely up to you. And I really don’t care how you organize your socks.

But think of what you can do with just ONE HOUR A DAY, and then ACT in that ONE HOUR A DAY in accordance with those goals. And I hope that goal is getting that dream project completed. I look forward to seeing it.

c