I’ve been thinking a lot lately about procrastination. It’s been a lifelong habit of mine, good or bad, and it’s funny that I interact with it on so many levels and for so many things.

For instance, showering. I love being in the shower, it’s warm and there’s water and when I’m done I’m clean and it’s awesome. And yet, every single day, it’s a battle to get myself into the shower. It makes me wonder what stuck I’ve got about showering, though I have a sneaking suspicion it’s more about what comes after. After the shower comes work, starting the day, doing the things on the to-do list. Before the shower, the day hasn’t really started, right?

And then I wonder, is making one change at a time another way of putting off my Somedays? Many of those sorts of people who supposedly know about these things say make one change at a time, concentrate on one thing. But if I’m spending up to 3 months developing one habit, what else am I putting off? Yeah, I need to floss every day, and that’s an important habit to create, but at the same time there are other habits that are equally important, but they’re for scarier goals. I want to draw every day, too, but I can put off building that habit simply by saying I’m learning to clean the catbox every day first.

There’s also “structured procrastination” (which I often find myself doing accidentally), wherein I schedule the Big Scary Thing, and then a bunch of lesser things I’ve also been putting off, and find myself barrelling through those lesser items tick-tick-tick to prove I’m busy so I don’t really have to do the Big Scary Thing just yet. Which is awesome when you do it on purpose, and slightly less awesome when it happens by accident (but still useful).

I finally got around one big procrastination step by having my darling Mum get me something really useful for Christmas this year — Havi’s Procrastination Dissolve-o-Matic. I haven’t read more than the awesome Fairy Dust yet, but I want to say that I already love it, not so much because I tried it but because she gave me permission not to do the part that was hard. There was a nifty face mudra thing with pressure points, and I started to do it but my glasses got in the way and my fingernails poked me so I stopped and read down the page — and Havi gave both permission not to do it, and an alternative for people with glasses and fingernails and other in-the-way-nesses.

And that, I think, is an important piece of the puzzle — permission to find a different way for myself, whatever that way will be.