Saud Omar

“I will spend miserable hours avoiding writing during the day, and then suddenly I will have to literally force my hand to the keyboard and just start writing. It’s like trying to walk underwater with steel boots on; it’s so hard, but within seconds it becomes effortless, if not effortless then an effort that’s infinitely more rewarding than the major amount of effort that have been butting to avoid that thing. 

You have to identify what the job is and then literally force yourself to begin doing it. It feels impossible to do because if you are like me then the state of productive working - when you are actually engaging with the thing that you afraid off - is actually very easy for you, and the state of putting off the things that you are afraid of - that make you anxious for whatever reason - takes a lot of energy and it’s really hard, and yet when you are in that state of procrastination you can’t imagine getting to the other side.

It’s a situation when you are in either state, the productive working state or the procrastination state, it almost impossible to imagine the other state; to trust that you have been there before and you can get there. When you are in the productive state you are like “why did I spend a lot of time procrastinating, this is so much easier than what I thought it would be?” and then the next morning you wake up and you just like “I can’t face that thing again.” 

Seriously, when I’m talking about forcing the hand it really is you have to send a mental order to your hand - or to your feet, or to whatever it’s that going to get you to the next stage - and start moving it. It never feel easy when you start and the only thing you can do is to start imitating the productive behavior that you want to be doing later, even if you feel like total fraud doing it. Imitate being smart and creative person and it will happens.”

John Hodgman, in an interview with Arming the Donkeys podcast