Procrastination – the enemy of success
Well I am a bit late for this post, which actually highlights the topic of this post. This series is based on the idea of success. I am working towards the goal of making this website/blog a success and measuring that success by how many visitors I get per day for a one month period. I am saying this is a success only when I have gotten 1000 visitors a day for 30 days. Not a small feat by any measure. Currently I am averaging somewhere around 10, not bad considering this is a very new site in a aging market. By aging I mean the blogosphere is highly saturated. It is not the same beast it was four years ago. I recently typed in “top blogs” in a google search and every last one was a commercial site of one type or another. Gone are the personal blogs of yester-year. You can’t very well compete with 30 blog posts a day by 30 different posters on one website.
That fact is compounded when you procrastinate. A fact that I am very guilty of. So, if you look at the archives, you’ll notice that I came out of the gate with a full head of steam. A solid 15 posts October. In December, I had 4. Granted it’s the holidays and I am in a turkey/football coma for most of it, but a lousy four posts is nothing to write home about.
You can not be successful if you procrastinate. There I said it. For all to see and admire. Why are people successful in life? From actors to engineers, they are successful because they bust their hump making it happen. They work. They have their goal in sight and they do nothing but work towards that goal. They are not 9-5′ers, those people that arrive at 9 and leave at 5 and don’t care what is happening.
For the last few weeks I have not been putting all the effort into this site and as a direct result, traffic is down, visits are down, page views are down. No promotion of the site on other blogs and that equates directly to no promotion of my site anywhere.
So, the big question is, what do you do about it. If you find yourself procrastinating about achieving the goals you have laid out for success, you need to, quite simply, cut it out. There’s no easy recipe for stopping the procrastinating circle. And it is a circle. The more work you have to do, the more you say you don’t want to do it, which of course piles up the work and makes even more work than when you started.
I have experienced this throughout college, especially graduate school. Once the procrastinating bug gets in you, it’s hard to get it out. The best thing I could do to avoid the bug was to not think about the work that was waiting for me to do. In a sense you have to just not think about it. If you find yourself thinking about it and not doing it, it will just spiral out of control. Go out for a drink, have dinner, visit friends, do anything you can possibly do that is not related to the task at hand. Get the weight off your shoulders and soon you won’t be thinking about it. Once you stop thinking about it, you’ll find that you’ll return to the computer and attack the task at hand.
So, that is where I am at with my measures of success. I month of holidays, football, turkey, procrastinating and no work on the site. This month I plan to post more often. One of my ideas to blogging was to post once every 3 days. I think I will be increasing that to daily, if I can manage. I also plan on posting about topics that are in the news. Perhaps adding a new category for current events. They say content is king, so I will be adding a great deal in the form of posts. I also plan on commenting on other blogs to see what the effect will be to traffic on this one. We’ll see where that gets us for the next monthly review!
