Helpful Tips: How Not To Work
1. Decide that before you can even begin your project, you must clean everything. Get out the dust rags and paper towels. Find the furniture polish. Get on your hands and knees to clean under the rugs. Use lint-removers to get rid of the cat fur on the desk chair. Brush the cats. Use lint-removers to pick up the new cat fur.
2. Isn’t there an old lamp in the basement that might be just perfect on your desk? It could make all the difference to have some better light in the room. Search the basement. Find the lamp. It is ugly, true, but it could be the very thing you need to get your work done. Who can tell without a bulb? You’ll need to go to the hardware store, to buy the correct bulb. While you’re there, you might as well pick up a couple of picture hangers. With all the new light in your office, you’ll probably need to redecorate just a tiny bit. There’s a frame store right down the block, too, so you can make a quick stop and pick up a couple of frames for those posters you bought at the museum last year. Did you ever write a thank you note to the sister of the friend who got you those free passes to the exhibition? It would be a good idea to stop by a gift store and buy a set of cards, ones you can use for all occasions. And don’t forget to buy new pens!
3. After all that running around, decide that what you really need is a nap. Napping is nature’s way of getting you into tip-top shape. Haven’t lots of big executives and great thinkers extolled naps as the key to their enormous success? Wasn’t there just a magazine article about this? Look for the magazine. Decide it is time to go through the stacks of magazines you’ve accumulated over the past weeks. Months. Pause to look at other articles that might also help you get to your goal quicker. Hunt for scissors with which to cut out some of the more useful articles. Decide it would be good to start a file where you know you could find these articles. Look through your old filing cabinet for a file you aren’t actively using so that you can start this new important file. Decide it is time to organize your filing cabinet. Eventually, fall asleep on the floor, covered by clippings.
4. Wake up from the nap and discover that you are hungry. What you need is some food. Then you can get down to work without any interruptions. If you have a big meal now, then you’ll be set. Pasta is good. Or maybe macaroni and cheese. That’s it! Macaroni and cheese is both comforting and inspiring. You loved it as a kid and let’s face it, you were enormously creative as a kid. You need to recapture that daring, whimsical part of yourself. Since you don’t have any boxes of mac-and-cheese mixes, you face the fact that you’ll need to start from scratch. Probably better to do this, anyway, since it involves the careful and loving preparation of ingredients from all parts of your life. There’s the cheese you were keeping for lunch tomorrow; there is flour. Are there bugs in the flour? Sift it to make sure. Good. No specks. Will soy milk work in the recipe you just found? Maybe. There’s the elbow macaroni you had on the shelf since 1998. But that kind of stuff doesn’t go bad, does it? Decide to check about expiration dates for macaroni on the Internet.
5. Make one or two phone calls, just so that you won’t have to answer the phone once you really dig in and get going. It makes perfect sense. You haven’t spoken to Jennifer in months — what if she suddenly decides to ring up when you’re hitting your big creative moment? That would be awful. And you know how she is: She just rattles off her life story. It would be impossible to say “Look, Jen, I’m in the middle of what could turn out to be the most significant work of my life and I just can’t talk now.” She would never understand. She is, after all, one of those people who is always talking about getting into her big life’s project but always finds excuses for putting it off.
Decide you simply can’t imagine what it would be like to go through life as one of those people who can’t get anything done. Decide to clean the phone before you call Jen.
