See, e.g., title of this blog...

So, have I mentioned that I tend to procrastinate? Yeah, well, that might be why my blog has been short of content recently. And I'd like to tell you that I'll write a nice meaty entry tonight, but I'm a bit far into my wine for much writing... it's The Boy's birthday and we've had a bit of celebrating.

So what do all of you do when you procrastinate?

For me it depends on what I'm delaying doing. In school when I had a paper to write I'd clean. My room never looked so good as when I had a deadline looming. Well, as it turns out, I've taken that habit into my working life. This past week I had a memo due and I'd done all the research. All that was left was the sitting down and the writing. I even knew what I was going to write!

So what did I do? Cleaned my office. It was about time too. I had stacks on top of stacks of paper. See, there's this client who sends a copy of every filing to the partner I work with and then faxes a copy to me in our main office (who faxes it on and then sends the original fax interoffice). This means that in this one case where we're one of like 6 defendants I get three of everything filed: discovery, letters, etc.

It piles up pretty quickly. And for a while I felt like I had to keep everything. Until I realized that - hey who knew! - we keep files of all of this stuff. And it's organized too! So rather than me digging through my desk looking for that one discovery request, it's far more efficient to trudge over the file room and pull it. So easy, so wonderful. I love the woman in charge of marking everything for filing and the woman who files it all.

Anyway, so while I was in the middle of cleaning my desk I recognized the behavior for what it was: procrastination. Didn't stop me from finishing cleaning. After all, like I said my office was a mess and with the summer associates starting I figured I should put on a good face. Oh, and I got that memo written, no problem (and having a clean desk really helped!)

With my writing I procrastinate differently (oh, I wish it were the same procrastinatory behavior because then I'd have a spotless abode!). I tend to try to organize and plot. Organizing means pulling out notecards and then trying to determine if I want to color code them or not (rarely do I end up using the notecards because I can't come up with a good color scheme). Plotting means lounging in bed or on the couch thinking up scenes and sometimes getting up to write them and sometimes falling asleep.

More of the latter.

That's what I did this weekend: orgainze and plot (in both senses of the word). It was brutal. It hurt. And I'll write more on it later. But until then, what do you do to procrastinate?