The best part of procrastinating is the feedback loop. You don’t call a friend when you’re thinking about them, then it’s been a while, and you feel bad for not calling, so you put off calling longer. And meanwhile the friend is doing the same thing, so you’re both feeling bad, and finally one of you gets the brilliant idea to call, and everything is fine! Until a few weeks have passed, and suddenly it starts over.

And you finally submitted a complete rewrite of an app that’s the first update in over two years, and there’s something minor wrong with it, but big enough that it doesn’t get approved, and you say, that was a good catch, app store people! I’ll fix that, but after getting all the way to the finish line and being rebuffed you think, well, let me just take a few days off from this and attend to other things and, oh, gee, has it been two weeks already?

And you set a goal to write every day, but you skip a day, then two, then you feel like you need to address the fact that you skipped a bunch of days, but then you think, who would want to read this navel-gazing clap-trap that’s effectively turned into a meta-blog?

But then you do it. You call your friend. You start storyboarding the necessary feature change. You sit down and start blogging again.

And plans don’t work out, and there’s bugs you didn’t anticipate, and you type 350 words and delete it all before starting again. But that’s OK, that’s how it works.

That said, it’s not that I haven’t been writing. Of course I write for work. Not just emails and the like, but I put together a new training video for some features that weren’t previously covered in training. What was supposed to be a five minute video on one particular feature turned into four videos (probably ranging from 3 to 6 minutes when all the editing is done) covering not only the feature, but a handful of preparatory steps that also weren’t covered in other training collateral.

The audience is mixed, so it’s a pretty reasonable assumption that about half the people watching it will just want to get right to the feature. But there are two important steps that are necessary before the feature can be used, and of the half that don’t want to jump to the end, probably 80% will need guidance for one of those steps and 20% will need it for both.

So it was a fun challenge creating a lesson series containing four tightly-interrelated segments, sliced and diced so that people who only need part of it can jump to what they need, but so that people who need more can get what they need in bite-sized chunks, but which chunks are arranged in a way such that they can stand alone or be consumed in order.

Wrote the script, did a screen recording of all the techniques I outlined, did a voice-over recording, and handed it all over to my editor, and he’s been working through it. Looking to publish next week.

But for whatever reason, writing for me just wasn’t happening. And I was dreading sitting down to type. And when I sat down to type, I was frowning. And as I wrap this up, I’m feeling… good.