When it comes to procrastinating, nobody does it as well as the writer. There’s always an email to reply to, a cup of coffee to make, an urgent task to deal with first. Which is just about fine when you’re working on your ‘maybe one day’ novel. But how do we in PR, comms and marketing write about a subject we know little about, have no personal interest in and would much rather be doing something else?

In the 20 years or so I’ve been teaching business writing, there are three things students want help with more than anything else:

1. writing about dull subjects
2. writing about complex subjects
3. writing about anything when there’s so much else to do

While these are three different problems, the advice I give is always the same – stop procrastinating and start copywriting.

If only it were that easy.

The problem with telling people to stop doing something is stopping is a passive activity. (If an activity can be classified as passive, that is.)

How do we learn how to NOT do something?

The only way to break one habit is to replace it with another. And procrastinating, despite what my students tell me, is a habit.

My advice, therefore, focuses on what we can physically do to start writing.

1. Embrace the subject

Yes, writing about the latest finance survey into active versus passive management might never excite you personally, but that’s the subject so there’s no point moaning about it.

No matter how ‘dull’ (by the way, there’s no such thing as dull subjects, there’s only dull writing) you feel the subject matter is, the people who are interested in that subject will find it totally riveting if you avoid stating the obvious, bigging up some minor improvement or missing the point altogether.

Even serious, techie, academic, political or financial subjects are written to be read by people. People, not job titles. Real people. So, write in a way that interests you and you’ll (probably) interest them too.

Oh, and if your client or manager feels that serious, techie, academic, etc. subjects need to be serious, techie… you get the idea, show them this blog post.

2. Procrastinate with purpose

As we all love procrastinating, we can use this to our advantage. Instead of doing something that prevents us from writing, we can do something that helps.

Tell yourself you don’t need to write whatever it is you should be writing just yet. The procrastinator in you will be very happy.

Then give yourself permission to spend 15-30 minutes researching the subject you need to write about. That could be looking at what’s been written already, doing a bit of online research or talking to someone who knows a bit more about it than you.

During that time WRITE what you’ve found. I can’t stress this enough. You must write (preferably in your own words and using pen and paper) what you’ve found out.

It’s tempting to copy and paste. But doing that results in a long document that you don’t really understand. Now 2,0oo words more than you need, the ‘copy and paste’ document feels overwhelming and is almost as intimidating as the blank screen.

3. Get the point (not to be confused with ‘get to the point’)

Stealing a quote from Einstein, “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

You need to say out loud what the point of the piece is. For example, this article is about procrastination in writing and the point is ‘being told not to do something is far less effective than being shown what to do and how to do it’.

Note, the ‘point’ is not the same as the subject.

The subject could be ‘a new survey on cancer survival rates’ but the point might be ‘cancer survival rates are higher in countries where patients can refer themselves directly to specialists.’

The more complex the subject, the more you need to be able to say what the point is in your own words.

Then write or type these easy to understand words at the top of the research page you wrote earlier. And possibly the middle and end as well.

4. Give yourself permission to write shit

Anyone who has attended any of my writing courses will be familiar with Hemingway’s famous line, “the first draft of everything is shit”.

Many of us struggle to start writing (or to stop deleting) because we want everything we write to be somewhere between good and perfect. That’s why we need to give ourselves permission to write any old rubbish without editing.

Set the timer on your phone for 5 minutes (or use one of those wonderful plastic tomato timers and follow the Pomodoro Technique) and write until the buzzer sounds.

No pausing, no editing, no trying to make it good let alone perfect. Just keep writing even if all you’re writing is “I’ve no idea what I’m talking about – I’m only writing this because I have to keep writing for 5 minutes”.

If you’re incapable of continuous writing, try Write or Die2. This clever piece of software can reward you with praise for reaching an agreed number of words without stopping. If praise doesn’t do it for you, it can also be set to Kamikaze mode and start deleting words if you don’t keep writing!

You should be able to write around 200-300 words in 5 minutes.  And, in case you’re thinking, “I only need to write a 25-word social media post”, the more words you write, the more choice you have when you come to editing, the better the final copy will be.

5. Reward yourself with easy to do stuff

There’s nothing new or clever about this tip. Every time management guru advises people to reward themselves on completion of a task.

But my advice is a bit more productive.

Before you start the dreaded writing task, write a list of easy tasks (writing or replying to an email, spending far longer than necessary on making a PowerPoint slide pretty, ordering in pizza, etc.) that you would normally choose to do before you started writing.

When you’ve written non-stop for 5 minutes, do one thing on your list.  If you got carried away and wrote for 10-15 minutes, have a treat too.

The proof is in the doing

How do I know this technique works?

Well apart from the fact I’ve been teaching it for years and people tell me it works, I just did it myself. Honestly. I can take over two weeks to write one of these blog posts. Today I wrote this one in about two hours. And that includes the research.

Go on. Give it a go. That pizza won’t order itself.

Want to attend one of my writing courses? Head on over to Events and see if anything floats your water transportation device.

Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash