Beyond Procrastination

It has been a just over two months since I returned to Sydney, after my wonderful journey back from the Dominican Republic. In my last blog, I covered the first part of my journey from Dominican Republic to Germany, to Amsterdam, then Brussels, to Spain, then three weeks in Morocco. At that time of posting that blog, I was in Istanbul about to travel to Thailand, and I wrote I would be writing about the second part of the journey in a day or two. Ha ha! A few days turned into a week, and then weeks turn into months!

I'm sure that I'm not the only person that procrastinates. And recognition and acknowledgement are powerful tools towards moving in a better direction. The last few weeks, I have been planning to write my next blog, but I keep getting put off by doing other things.

One thing that I did decide in the last month or so as I began to write about the rest of my journey, was that I kind of started to think that I had enough to possibly turn out an e-book rather than simply a blog post. But that doesn't explain my slackness for no other blogs in the last two months. Being lazy and procrastinating is basically what it's all been about. I think the big thing seems to be about breaking habits and that's why I am writing this blog tonight. It will not be very long, but the goal is simply to get back into writing and publishing.

While I am not too stressed about the low readership of my blog, I do believe that if I had a higher readership, there would be a lot more motivation to write and publish regularly.

Today, as I sat in the park, I was enjoying the sun as it resurfaced from behind various clouds. It was not the warmest of days but it was warm enough to be out in the park, drinking coffee and writing in my journal. Besides a bit of a catch up of my last week, I also was using the journal to plan the week ahead. What I tend to find, is that as I write in my journal, I often reflect on the week that has been and today I was feeling very conscious of how in the last week besides teaching, I had spent a lot of time watching movies, but not getting much else done.

I thought about the lists of tasks and activities that I had planned to do over the last week or two, and how many of them had not been acted on. I did not spend too much time feeling bad about it, but it did motivate me to want to get cracking for this coming week. In my journal, thinking about various things that had not been acted on, I got writing them down, and more than that I strategised about how many could be put into action within 24 hours.

And since returning from the park, action has been occurring!

I went out to see a friend, then went to the supermarket. The weather had changed a lot and it had started to rain and was getting quite cold too. This seemed to add to my motivation, so as evening arrived, activities have been in operation. I started putting pictures on my walls that I have been wanting to hang up for a few weeks. I went through some bags and boxes and started to organise a few of my favourite things to display in my room. I took my vitamins, which may not sound like a big deal, but it is about doing rather than avoiding, and I did some planking exercise. I tidied my room, washed some dishes, went through my activity list again, emailed the Education Department about online listing for teaching, posted some photos on Instagram and Facebook. I have been wanting to start writing more reviews on IMDb, and so I wrote two of them just a few minutes ago, and realised it is a good idea to write film reviews as soon as you have watched a movie. I thought I would remember all my opinions and thoughts, but once you have watched other movies and done other things, the memories of movies do diminish. Now I am writing this blog, which as I said will be a fairly short one for today, but the idea will be to start writing far more regularly, at least once a week. Once I have edited this blog and posted it, I will read at least one chapter of the latest novel that I have borrowed for my Kindle from the library. Then I will do some meditation and then if there is time before sleep, I will either watch a you tube documentary on Persia or some of another movie.

I wish you all a good week and will write again soon.