How to Stop Procrastinating
This is a travel blog, not self help. I’m not well versed in that aspect of life. It’s really not part of my skill set but I can usually tell when I’m doing it, though. Sometimes it takes months like in this case. It all started when a co-worker saw a photo of me standing in front of my truck in Tuktoyaktuk with the Arctic Ocean sign in the background.
It’s a great conversation starter. It eventually led to discussing the video Bella and I put together of the trip. The one here. The easiest way to share that is to send the link to the post Bella put up. Finding the link my work computer got me to notice that I needed to do some site maintenance. And doing that I realized how we’ve neglected this site. It’s kind of embarrassing, to be honest. The post in that link is from September of 2022. It’s currently February of 2024. 16 months ago. The only other post in the time between was the solution to a Christmas card puzzle Bella added in December 2022. Not a single post in the entirety of 2023. What happened? Was it because we didn’t have anything to write about?
Emphatically, no. We’ve gone to some simply amazing places. Bucket list destinations like the Falkland Islands, Antarctica, Greenland, Campeche in Mexico, and Malawi in Africa. All wonderful experiences where we took plenty of photos and videos, and we have all kinds of stories to tell. Why didn’t we write about them? I guess for me it’s kind of like maintaining a healthy weight. It’s something I want to do, something I know is good for me, but ultimately it takes habits and a fair bit of work. You can skip a day and not much happens, a week goes by and you can hardly tell. String a few of those together you get a month, and then it’s easy to turn that into 16 months of inactivity and over sixty pounds of unattractive fat that leaves you out of breath when tying your shoes.
What’s the solution? I think it’s to just do something. The simplest thing was to tell Bella I was going to post something and suddenly I was committed. I can’t back out now. I was going to learn how to edit together all the movies we took in Malawi and turn that into an awesome video post for today but that’s kind of like losing sixty pounds by going to the gym on the weekend. Clearly unrealistic. As I sit here looking at the free trial of Final Cut Pro I realize that’s not going happen and I’m tempted to just shut it off for the day. So instead I’m just writing a blog post. It isn’t ground breaking but I had to relearn how to get a photo onto our site, how to export it to a size consistent with some of the limitations of a website. I had to remember how to post, remember to write with the terrible modern punctuation of a single space after a period. Refresh my memory of how to link to another page.
This post is actually a written commitment to not let Just A Carry On whither away. I’m going to create more content. After all, how hard can it be to post more frequently than once a year? Time to stop procrastinating.
~ Freddy
