Strategy or Systematically Delayed?

I am a procrastinator. I have been for as long as my memory recalls. When I was in junior high and high school, I would wake up at the last possible minute to get ready and run to school. During my senior year, day after day, I would get to my classroom just as the morning tardy bell rang. After receiving homework assignments, I would wait to start working on them the night before they were due. Because I was so actively involved in drama and choir, and often had rehearsals and performances after school, this meant that sometimes I was up until 2am working on homework. I see now that was also part of the reason I slept in until the last possible minute.

But, for plays or recitals or big projects, this strategy didn't always work. For example: when I went to try out for a drama scholarship at SUU, I memorized my script on the car ride there, but during the audition I was too stressed to remember what I had just memorized. Or like the time my insect collection was due in Biography and we had rainy, rainy weather the few days prior to its due date (even though I knew about it over 2 weeks in advance) and I couldn't find enough bugs, so I got a much lower grade on it.

I need deadlines to give me motivation. I need due dates to give me pressure and keep me going. I know that about myself. But with my creative projects, ones that require no deadline, there never seems to be any completion, any finish, any end.

Like the children's scrapbooks. Or my vacation scrapbooks. Or my blog.

Part of my problem is that I'm chronologically anal. I hate doing things out of order; I always have. So take my procrastination problem and add it to my chronologically anal problem, and the result is that I'm ALWAYS behind!

I tend to start new projects because I get so overwhelmed with other unfinished projects. Last year, I had caught up Ammon's baby/toddler scrapbook to 2003. I was actually happy that I was only "5 years" behind. So I decided to start a vacation scrapbook of when Josh and I went to England. I thought I could finish it quicker because, after all, it was only 10 days worth of photos to scrapbook. But then I wasn't going scrapbooking with the girls as much anymore, and the book wasn't getting done. Then I started a blog. I thought it would serve as a journal and a motivator to me to keep current. I thought it would help me feel more "caught up" on my life, so that I wouldn't feel so behind on EVERYTHING else. But then I started only uploading the photos to put on my blog, and not uploading ALL the photos off my camera. At Easter this year, I handed out printed copies of photos I took at Easter last year. This past weekend I started uploading July 2008 photos (that's where I last left off) from my camera to my computer. Isn't that just pathetic?

So now that I've been out out of the scrapbooking mode for so long, I don't want to work on any of my unfinished books. I'm so far behind on uploading 2008 photos that I don't even want to upload even recent photos. I don't want to write anything on my blog that's out of order, and since there's no photos uploaded, I don't want to write a story now and add photos later, so there's just NO stories being taken out of my brain and put in writing. No blog, No scrapbook, No photos being worked on. I just feel overwhelmed because I actually DO want to do something. Maybe I should just start a new project? That way I won't feel so overwhelmed!

I need a new strategy. Clearly the system I've got just isn't working. Any suggestions?