Four Ways Procrastinating Can Feel Productive When Writing

And four tips for overcoming this

Photo by VD Photography on Unsplash

Have you ever felt like you were working for weeks but never really progressing with a writing project — never getting to the point where you could say something was finished, but you felt you had been busy all the time.

It could have been what I call productive procrastination. It feels like you are doing something, but it’s just busy work, and not helping you achieve your writing goals.

This can look like many things, and happen for many reasons.

1. Overplanning

This usually occurs at the start of a project, and can often be because you don’t know where to start. Or you aren’t confident in your abilities to pull off the idea.

Some planning is necessary, but there comes a point where fear of starting becomes a form of procrastination. Where that point is will be different for everyone; some people are planners and need a lot of detail, others are happy to start with a fragment of an idea and see where it takes them.

But if you are planning and planning and never starting, then it’s procrastination. If you are spending more time on deciding what karaoke song your fantasy elf would perform than writing the novel (unless karaoke is a key plot point), then you are probably procrastinating.

It can happen later on in a project, if you get stuck, it feels very similar — you can plan out your edits, write detailed chapter summaries, move post-it notes around on a whiteboard. None of this changes one word in the actual writing project. It might be necessary, but it gets to a point where you are shuffling things round for the sake of it.

How to overcome this

You have to start anyway — even if you are afraid it will be rubbish, or you are telling yourself that there is just one more thing to decide.

Try starting, because what’s the worst that could happen? You can always change it later. You have to edit, or realise that your plan wasn’t quite right. Either way, that’s information you can use to make it better. And maybe you have to change the plan, but sometimes that’s part of the joy of writing.

And if you are still unsure, then set yourself a deadline to start by.

But just put the plan aside and get writing.

2. The Research Rabbithole

This can be part of overplanning, but it can also crop up when you are in the middle of writing something. You get stuck on writing a passage and realise you need to know a specific fact or find a quote, maybe you need to know how far a horse and rider can travel in a day, or the number of moons around Saturn. So you go and look it up, and then find more and more detail which you are sure will add colour and detail to your writing.

But then one bit of research leads to another, and the whole session is gone, and you haven’t returned to the passage you were stuck on. Then maybe in your next writing session, you continue the research because you need to make sure you have it correct. And you tell yourself that this isn’t procrastination, it’s important information that you can’t continue without. But actually, it’s an avoidance tactic.

How to overcome

If your writing sessions are becoming research binges, then the best way to overcome this is to separate them out. While you are writing, if something comes up that you need to research, make a note of it, put in a placeholder in your text, ‘the spaceship landed on the XXX moon of Saturn’ or ‘they rode for [CHECK] miles that day.’ (Use something that you can easily search for when editing). Then (and this is the important bit) continue writing. Schedule a separate session to get the research completed. Then, in that session, go back through your notes and look up all the information that you needed to.

3. Improving Your Writing Skills

It’s very easy to think that improving your writing skills will help you progress your writing project. This could be by watching videos, reading articles or even studying a writing course.

And all of these can help. Especially a good writing course which can teach you so much, as well as help build relationships with other writers.

But endlessly consuming content about writing, and not actually writing — that’s procrastination again.

If you have limited time for writing, and you are spending it learning all the time, then you are not working on your own project. And this feels fine, because you can tell yourself that you are improving your skills.

Like over-planning, this can be an avoidance technique, and one that can pop up at any time. Maybe at the start, when you are planning a novel and want to learn more about world-building. Maybe you need to edit the first draft of your novel, and you spend a year doing courses on how to edit, instead of actually editing the novel.

How to overcome

This is one of the hardest ones to recognise, because you are learning. And it’s easy to tell yourself that that is progress. But one of the best ways of getting better at writing or editing is to just do it. And then get feedback on your work — find a beta reader, a friend, or someone whose writing opinion you trust.

Improving your writing skills is essential, and this type of content can be helpful, just make sure that you are not doing them instead of working on your own projects.

4. Editing

This sounds like a bit of a strange one, because you need to edit your work before you send it out to anyone else. You need to make sure that the structure is solid, and there are minimal typos.

But there comes a point where you are not necessarily improving it, just changing words around for the sake of it. Possibly because you are afraid to send it out, because sending it out means getting someone else’s opinion of it.

It means sharing something you might have spent years of work on with the world. And it can be scary when it moves from being your writing to someone else’s reading.

How to overcome this

The question you have to ask yourself is, are the edits I am making changing things significantly, or am I just taking out full stops one day, and putting them back in the next? Recognising when you have finished editing can be one of the hardest things, because once you’re done, there’s nothing else but send it out into the world.

So that’s what you have to do. It can be scary, but submit it.

Give yourself a deadline or time limit for editing. Once you have reached that, hit send. You could start small, send out the first chapter to a trusted friend, or find a beta reader and get a second opinion on what further edits are required. But at the end of the day, it needs to be shared.

How do you identify productive procrastination from actual progress?

I’ve mentioned a few ways productive procrastination can appear, but it can be quite hard to identify between meaningful progress and busy work. The best way to recognise this is to think about what the ultimate aim is with the project, and if your actions are getting you any closer to that aim. If you are writing a novel, are your actions getting you closer to writing ‘The End’?

Looking back at what you have achieved in the last six months, or over a year, is a good technique for assessing this. Write down everything you have done to work on your project, then divide it into two columns: one that shows progress, and one that shows procrastination.

This can help you identify if you are stuck in an unproductive loop, where you feel like you are achieving things, but your project doesn’t progress, and you are stuck in the same place. It can be a comfortable place to be, but you have to challenge yourself and step out of that zone to truly develop your writing.