Five tips for getting out of the valley of procrastination

Photo: Vic / CC-BY / via Wikimedia Commons

You know the feeling. You’re starting a new project. Or you’re getting ready to work on an existing project. But how do you start? And how do you make sure that you’re not getting stuck in the valley of procrastination and just scrolling your favourite social medium?

I asked the wonderful people of the Storytellers United community for work methods, rituals and other ways to stir up your creativity. Here are five tips they had on getting out of the valley of procrastination.

1. Collect references. This can be done before the actual work and brainstorming. It allows you to diverge and explore tangents. Most of the things will not end up featuring directly in the project, but they give a nice basis to start converging from and often help to surface themes. And they might help you later if you’re getting stuck.
2. Have conversations. Having open conversations with people on the same topic but with a different perspective helps too. The more voices you can get to reflect on your project the more insights you’ll get.
3. Do as much as possible right now. You just had your brilliant new idea / project / job / proposal. Use the initial excitement to get things done, without being critical, exigeant and overcomplicating things. Just do as much as you can with the resources currently at hand. This will also help if you’re getting stuck later on. At least you have this initial version you can work on.
4. Finetune. When the inevitable deadline comes up it is time to finetune the concept (hopefully you’ve done step 3). A way to get all your thoughts on the table is by using a large sheet of paper and fill it up with everything related to your project to find out emerging relations and ideas.
5. Estimate. During the deadline phase hopefully everything comes together magically. It helps to estimate the duration of this phase and put aside time for it. The more you’ve done beforehand the better you’ll be in estimating how much time this phase will take.

So that’s it. Do you have any other rituals or methods you’re using to get unstuck? Share them!

If you want more advice when stuck on a project, read this great article by fellow Storytellers United member Kim Plowright.