Photo copyright Argon(one): Give me a padded room, please

is making me flake.

Actually, Miss Procrastination has been my consort for many years. You could say we live together in an unholy pairing: I always threaten to kill her, but she gets the better of me every time. I think I’m probably hopelessly codependent.

Yet there are strategies for being a more productive writer. A very successful writer/director friend of mine once suggested what he called the “Kitchen Timer” method, which does work. Basically, you do this:

• Open your project (your novel, your screenplay, your whatever) document on your word processing program
• Open your Journal (or create one, for the first time you do this)

Then you take, say, a 2-hour block of time (or whatever works for you). You sit there and you work on your project, or not. If you don’t work on your project, you write in your journal: stream of consciousness, “morning pages,” recipes, lists of what to do later today, what have you. Or nothing. You can just sit. Then you go back to your project when you tire of the journal. And sometimes you just sit there. Usually, I’ve found, that some creativity comes even when you’re not expecting it, if you just make the quiet space for it.

I’ve written a few scripts and two novels using the Kitchen Timer Method. And yes, I do believe that the “act” of just sitting there staring into space is part of the mystery of writing.

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There’s also a bunch of really helpful tools to keep an internet addict on track (yes, I qualify for that moniker). I need these because I find that as long as the WiFi is on, I’ll bail on the journal portion of the Kitchen Timer Method and go surf the internet or lurk on Facebook instead of staying in that quiet space. Best solution I’ve found for that is Freedom, an app which cuts your device off from the internet for a specified time interval. The only way to get it back on before the time interval runs out is to power off and reboot, which I never have done. So I find it very effective.

Even if there is internet research to be done for a piece of writing, I’d rather use Freedom and make a list of what I have to look up, rather than just surf randomly and end up in an internet rabbit hole – which for me is incredibly easy.

I also use browser-specific website blockers for certain sites — there’s Chrome Nanny for Chrome, to keep Facebook and HuffPo and others at bay; there’s Leechblock for Firefox, which does the same thing. I’m sure there are others.

What’s your method to fight procrastination? I can’t be the only one. . .