The First Time
About 10 years ago was the first time I realized that I actually “like” procrastinating.
Back in high school, I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft. But I always chose servers where progression was faster. I tried multiple times to play on the official servers with my classmates, but everything felt so slow there. I would play for a few days, reach around level 15–20, then quit and go back to the faster servers.
At that time, I didn’t have work stress or really any kind of stress, so I couldn’t blame it on that.
Since my previous post, three days have passed. I did procrastinate a bit — even though I had time to write — but I also had a lot of other things to do. And alongside work, I ended up building a web app from a completely random idea (I’ll write about it if it launches), and I poured all my free time into it.
This time, fortunately, it was an idea where I didn’t find any compromise that would make it not worth finishing. It’s not exactly the kind of product I’ve been wanting to build for a long time — something that could generate steady monthly income — but instead a simple solution to a problem that almost everyone runs into every few months.
Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of idea people would really pay for — but it can generate traffic. So I decided to build it anyway, and later, when I have a new idea, I can feature it there as one of my other services. Hopefully, it will bring in some “free” traffic as well.
During these three days, lying in bed in the evenings before falling asleep, it kept coming back to me that I hadn’t written — even though I wanted to.
And then I remembered an idea — I don’t know if I saw it on YouTube or read it somewhere — about what to do when you want to write but don’t have inspiration, and you don’t like the idea of just writing about your day.
The suggestion was to take a book or a collection of poems, read a few pages or a poem, and then write about:
what you were thinking while reading it
what it made you feel
how it could be present in your own life
The first thing that came to my mind was Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I pick it up from time to time and flip through it.
When I don’t have an idea for what to write, I read a thought and try to answer these questions:
“What is this really saying?”
“How is this true for me right now?”
“What would I do if I actually took this seriously?”
If I don’t come up with a better idea, this is probably what I’ll write about next. 🙂