How Did I Procrastinate Before YouTube?

It’s my day off from the day job and I am sitting at my desk working on my procrastination skills. I started out strong—opened my writing file, wrote a few paragraphs, and then re-wrote a few different paragraphs. It started to get away from me when I went to the kitchen for coffee and ended up making an entire breakfast.

I sat back down at my desk, and decided to check my email. That was a mistake. Someone had sent me a link to a funny video that led me to watch a few movie trailers. From there I went to iTunes and rented five 99 cent movies to have for later. Then I watched more movie trailers.

That is how I came across a clip from Incredibles 2. It reminded me of helping my kids with their homework. Math was always especially frustrating, as ‘they’ were always coming up with new methods to get the same answers. If you had multiple children in different grades, it was entirely possible they would be taught different methods to do math. Certainly, different than anything I had been taught.

My youngest, who is now a freshman in college, has always been a stickler for rules. When she was taught in class how to do something, she refused to do it any other way, even if it got her the same answer faster. She was convinced that if she didn’t do it the way her teacher taught her to, she would get in trouble.

Thinking about my youngest, got me thinking about her as a little kid, and that got me thinking about her favorite movie, Finding Nemo. She would bug us constantly to watch it, again and again.

“Nemo, Nemo, Nemo,” she would repeat this incessantly until we caved.

While I was going down the YouTube rabbit hole, I found something that would have made my life a lot easier back then—a version of Finding Nemo that speeds up every time they say the name ‘Nemo’. It’s genius, and only a little over eight minutes.

I now feel I have procrastinated enough this morning. I will now go to the bathroom, refill my water bottle, clean up my breakfast dishes, stare into the fridge, take the dogs out, find some matches to light a candle, write a letter to my mom, turn the heat up, look fruitlessly for my slippers, clean out my desk drawers, water my plants, and settle down to finish the scene I was writing before I got distracted.

Have a great week.