procrastination – Tim O'Hare

How I killed my blog post writing streak #other

Last year, despite not really knowing why (i.e. who I was writing for other than for myself) I decided to make a concerted effort to get into the habit of writing posts for this website on a reasonably frequent basis. By reasonably frequent I was hoping to add three or four entries each week or, to borrow a phrase from the writer Oliver Burkeman, dailyish.

After a fairly slow start (four new entries in January 2025), I picked up momentum and went on to add eight in February, twelve in March, thirteen in April, seven in May, eleven in June, eight in July, and another eight August. Okay, I wasn’t hitting an average of three or four entries per week, but with five separate weeks during which I wrote no entries at all (in January, February, March, April and July) and a five week hiatus with zero entries between mid-May and mid-June, I had managed to write 71 entries in the 23 weeks in which I did produce some new words, giving me an average of just over three entries per week in those ‘productive’ weeks.

During this time period, my blog posts were split between six categories – 24 relating to my Art, 24 about books that I had read, 18 that featured my poems (transferring these across from my poetry website andapoet.blog), five about my writing, three that I described as ‘Wisdom’ and a couple that were ‘Miscellaneous’.

I was generally pleased with how I was doing, and the progress I was making. I had generated a list of topics for future posts – about the art I created, the books I had read, poems I had to add to the site, snippets about my writing, walks that I could describe etc. – which gave me no shortage of future material. Having this list ought to have been positive, indeed it was positive during the first eight months of the year. My progress continued into September, as I added another five entries in the first twelve days of the month. But then I stopped writing completely, my last entry being on 12th September 2025, some 279 days ago… a long time… over three-quarters of a year…

What changed? Did I just get bored? Did I get distracted? Did I decide that since pretty much no-one reads what I write here there simply wasn’t any point in my continuing? It’s possible that the latter was a contributing factor. It’s certainly one that has led me to question my blog writing activity before (for example see Habits, Daily Blogging… Is This The End? ), but no, those answers are not the answer…

My blog writing activity died off because I innocently did the one thing that is pretty much guaranteed to stop me doing any activity I am engaged in, or want to be engaged in. I turned a thing into a THING. This is something that I have written about on this website before, back in 2018 in fact – see: Turning Things Into THINGS. It is one of the primary ways that I sabotage my own desire to tackle an activity. Turning a thing into a THING involves taking what could be a simple, interesting, enjoyable activity, and ambitiously growing it in my mind by adding extra elements (‘bells-and-whistles’) so that it becomes a huge, enormously complicated, and/or daunting challenge that my brain then looks at and says “no thank you very much – that looks like a project that is far too difficult, and potentially painful, for me to take on”.

In the case of this blog, turning a thing into a THING took the following form. In early September 2025 I sat down, looked at my carefully curated and categorised list of potential blog post topics and decided that it would be really great to accelerate my writing so that I was fully ‘caught up’ by the end of November 2025. This was a 10 week period and I had 61 possible blog post topics on my list (many about books that I had read during the previous few months). 61 posts in 10 weeks? ~6 posts per week? That’s only one per day, with a day spare each week… sounds perfectly doable doesn’t it?

Well no, it doesn’t, or at least it shouldn’t have, but what did my brain have to say about the idea? I can tell you. In a journal entry that I wrote on Saturday 13th September I wrote the words ‘… it’s a good plan and I can try to get into a good discipline of writing daily posts on weekdays and adding one or two at the weekends if I can or if I have missed weekday posts‘. It all sounds so simple… [I’ll also note here that my had a multi-week sequence that rotated through the different categories of the possible posts in such a way that they were all nicely spread out through the entire period. If that sounds a bit over-the-top then temember, my plan wasn’t a ‘thing’, it was a ‘THING’.]

If I had set my stall out to simply to carry on writing the odd blog post when I had the chance – perhaps two or three in a good week – then it would have been an activity, a thing, that would have stood a decent chance of getting done. Instead, I turned the thing into a THING and, in the process, killed the activity entirely. To make matters worse, not only have I added nothing to this site for the best part of nine months, but during those months I have frequently berated myself for, and felt disappointed with, my lack of action. I killed off an activity I enjoyed, and I gave myself a new stick to beat myself with. Bravo!

On countless occasions over the last few months I have thought about how I might get back to writing for this blog. Mostly, my thoughts have revolved around trying to come up with new ways that I can somehow, magically, catch up with my post backlog. You see, the perfectionist/completist/collector in me hates the idea that I might not write an entry for every book that I have read, every piece of artwork I produce etc. It quickly rules out the simplest approach, which is to just start adding entries again relating to what I am up to at the moment. An incomplete sequence? A gap? No, no, NO… you cannot possibly have a gap.

But I have fought with myself for long enough, and I recognise that the choice is a simple one. I can think that I can somehow catch up and be destined to remain stuck forever (or at least far behind where I’d like to be), or I can just write something and be done with it. And somehow, unusually for me, the second of these options seems, finally, to have come out on top.

So, here I am again, back on the blog. I’d like to think that I will be able to write new posts on a reasonably frequent basis – two or three a week would be great, one or two would be okay – and I’m going to try to allow myself to write a mix of posts, some relating to ‘now things’ and others picking selected topics from the list that I created previously without requiring myself to cover them all, or to ‘catch up’ within any specific time frame or better still, ever.

Will I be successful? Well I’m not even going to try to second guess the answer to that question. To do so will surely only lead to me into making another marvellous plan in an attempt to ensure success, a marvellous plan that will actually, almost certainly, guarantee failure!

The Mountain Is You – Brianna Wiest #reading

The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery by Brianna West is probably not a book that I would have picked up to read of my own accord, despite that fact that I am pretty much certain that a lot of the struggles I have in pushing myself into action and gaining the sense of achievement and fulfillment that I crave are driven at a fundamental level by self-sabotage in one form or another. There is just something about the whole mountain metaphor, along with the kinds of words used in the book blurb that I read online (‘deep internal work of excavating trauma’, ‘building resilience’, and ‘adjusting how we show up for the climb’) that instinctively put me off. Why then did I work my way through this book for a few weeks in April and May this year? Because it was voted as the reading matter for the May meeting of The Timecrafting Trust Book Club that I participate in, and so, dutifully, I ordered myself a copy and set to work.

Almost from the start, I realized that there might well be a bit more value for me from The Mountain Is You than I had envisaged. I was immediately stuck with some obvious similarity between some of the content being covered and the ideas of psychotherapist Carl Jung that I found enthralling and thoroughly convincing when I read James Hollis’s excellent The Middle Passage a year or so ago.

Wiest begins her book by describing the various forms that self-sabotage can take along with the underlying reasons why each type of self-sabotaging behaviour occurs. There were quite a few lines in this section of the book that resonated with me…

‘sometimes, we sabotage our professional success because what we really want it to create art‘
‘sometimes, our most sabotaging behaviours are really the result of long-held and unexamined fears we have about the world and ourselves‘
‘human beings experience a natural resistance to the unknown, because it is essentially the ultimate loss of control‘

… because yes, I do increasingly seem to be seeing myself as an artist, yes, I definitely have a lot of fears squashed down into my head that hold me back, and yes, I do tend to get overwhelmed and feel very uncomfortable when I perceive that things are spinning out of my control. But why then, knowing all of this, does nothing much really seem to change? Wiest delivers the killer answer:

‘most people do not actually change their lives until not changing becomes the less comfortable option‘

Wiest goes on to argue that, in fact, we might be better off re-framing self-sabotage because, ultimately, the habits and behaviours associated with it are actually a result of your very clever subconcious ensuring that some unfilled need, displaced emotion or neglected desire is being met – that those actions are, in fact, deliberately designed to provide a positive outcome that some hidden part of your subconscious seeks.

Aand funnily enough, just this morning, quite coincidentally, I wrote in my journal that perhaps I allowed myself to procrastinate and hold myself back from taking certain actions even though I know this will result in an intense wave of frustration and anger with myself, because at least those negative feelings and emotions are something that I am familiar with and are, in some weird and twisted way, somewhat comforting.

The next section of The Mountain Is You describes a long list of different manifestations of self-sabotage, and whilst many of these did not feel relevant to me, some of them certainly did – hello Perfectionism, Worrying About Least Likely Circumstances, Being Busy, Fear Of Failure, to name a few.

The start of the process of overcoming self-sabotage begins, Wiest suggests, with tuning into, and listening to, the negative emotions associated with it – things like anger, jealousy, regret, chronic fear. She highlights a basic need to be able to ‘allow yourself to feel what you feel without judgement or suppression and notes that understanding your needs, meeting the ones you are responsible for, and then allowing yourself to show up so others can meet the ones you can’t do on your own will help you break the self-sabotage cycle’. For example, feel angry, notice that you are angry, understand why you are angry, remember that it is okay to feel angry… and then get on with life.

There are then a couple of chapters with fairly standard fare on building emotional intelligence and on letting go of baggage from the past, but as these progressed I could feel the book moving steadily into the kind of territory that my initial instincts had led me to expect. Then, aargh, I hit a section titled ‘Releasing your past into the Quantum Field‘ and my brain was instantly screaming at me that I was now thoroughly into pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo land… the kind of land where, apparently, ‘You store … emotions, energies and patterns at a cellular level‘. Now, I guess that in some sense everything associated with an individual human is stored at a cellular level, but I am pretty sure that Wiest is suggesting there’s something rather more mysterious and perhaps spiritual going on. I’d be inclined to simply say that statements of that kind are just nonsense!

I guess that from that point onwards, my brain was in a state of high alert, warning me, perhaps unfairly, that much of what I was reading had no real, solid basis. There were lots of nice, almost mantra-like phrases: ‘be willing to be disliked‘, ‘do your inner work‘ and a series of suggestions to ‘create aligned goals, ‘find you inner peace’, ‘detach from worry’, ‘take triggers as signals’, ‘honour your discomfort’, ‘stop trying to be happy’, ‘arrive into the present’ etc., but in the end it was all a bit too much – too many suggestions, too many affirmations, too many challenges to think about overcoming, with the result that I came away confused and somewhat disappointed. After a promising, really very readable first half, everything seemed to have unraveled as the book reached its conclusion. There was just nothing much that was concrete or tangible for me to cling onto.

Late on in the book there was one phrase that I rather liked in a section titled ‘Be aware of what you give your energy’, namely that ‘the wolf that wins is the one that you feed‘ and strangely, on the day that I read those lines some spoke almost the exact same words to me (perhaps that pesky quantum field was doing its thing…). In fact, the whole book is stuffed full of short phrases and sentences that you could lift off the page and incorporate into an inspirational poster or social media post if that is your thing. I may not have warmed to Wiest’s mountain metaphor or felt that the argument in The Mountain Is You hung together in a fully coherent and convincing manner, but she certainly knows how to write what might be called ‘soundbite sentences’. Forget all the gumph about releasing you past into the quantum field and storing emotions at a cellular level, and take this phrase, right at the end of the book… …

‘One day, the mountain that was in front of you will be so far behind you, it will barely be visible in the distance. But who you become in learning to climb it? That will stay with you forever.‘

BOOM!

Scott Building and Beckley Point, Plymouth #art

I’m a bit of a perfectionist, something which has definitely held me back over the years as I have held off pursuing certain activities ‘in case I couldn’t live up to expectations’ (a trait that I am sure many serial perfectionist procrastinators will be very familiar with). One such activity was always drawing and painting, so it was a bit of a surprise to me when, about a year ago (April 2024), I quite suddenly started painting and following a short video course on what is usually called ‘loose’ watercolour painting, I found that I was (mostly) quite able to side-step my need for ‘perfect’ and simply paint – deliberately being quick was a key element in this. Even better, not only did perfectionism not get in the way of me being able to paint, but I found that painting in a non-perfect way helped my loosen the grip that perfectionism had on me more generally.

This little picture, painted a few agos, is a nice example of imperfectionism at work. It is a view of the Scott Building (University of Plymouth) on the left with the towering mass of Beckley Point accommodation block behind. If you were to stand where the photo that this picture is based on was taken, you would instantly notice all kinds of discrepancies – the colour of the closest building isn’t quite right, the ground appears to rise upwards because of the way I have used horizontal lines for the shadow cast by the building and the small building in the background (the Reynolds Building in which I used to have my office) is far too small. But none of this really matters. For a start, it’s only a little painting that almost no-one will ever see (and those that do probably won’t know what the scene looks like in reality), but more importantly, I have come to learn that it is the quirky little ‘undetails’ in a picture – a wiggly line here, am improbable colour there, the scratchy outline of a person – that add fun into the mix, and that it is far more important to vaguely capture the sense of a place rather than replicate it in every detail (although pictures like that can also be wonderful and interesting of course).

So, here’s to this quick, little, watercolour picture with all its imperfections – nice and bright, rather jolly and, I think, a sense of movement. It’s not supposed to be a masterpiece, it’s just fine as it is!