• Julius Topohozin

The popular saying: Procrastination is a thief of time can also be applied to creativity, especially to writing. People who procrastinate are not writers because writers write but procrastinators procrastinate.

Procrastination is the act of putting off what one ought to do to a future date or at a more convenient time. In this article, I have discussed eight ways procrastination kills your creativity.

 

• The time may not be available 

The truth of the matter is that most times, the things you put off doing at a later time may not get done because the time isn’t there anymore. The time inspiration surfaces is the right time to make the most of it by channeling it into creativity.

 

• Inspiration not documented becomes lost

For writers, inspiration can spring up at any time and in any place. The ability to trap or pin down that idea with pen and paper or type it on your phone will be the saving grace not to lose the inspiration altogether. It is a known fact that the human memory has a short lifespan. As it is said, the faintest ink is more powerful than the sharpest memory.

 

• Inability to recall 

When you procrastinate as a writer, you may likely never recall or re-enact the original flow of the inspiration when it struck.

 

• Pushing creativity to the grave

The most fertile and prolific place on the planet earth is the burial ground. This is because great ideas and dreams don’t get to see the light of day because the one with the dream loses his life. So, as a writer, when you procrastinate, you are simply pushing your creativity to its final resting place-the graveyard.

 

• Procrastination makes you unproductive 

The reason many so-called writers have not published a single book in many years is attributed to remaining a student in the school of procrastination year in, year out. They keep putting off working on the abandoned chapters in their novels or fine-tuning a dialogue in their plays or even editing the lines in their poetry. If all the writers the world has ever produced allowed procrastination to impede their call into writing, the world would not have known them, let alone celebrated them.

 

• It makes you remain a mediocre 

The fact that pleasure for idleness is chosen above perspiring in reading, is the reason many ‘writers’ remain mediocre. The time they should have used to dig into concepts and topics that will give life to their writing have been wasted in procrastination. Even when such writers write, their writing is lacking substance.

 

• Decline in inspiration 

When an instrument has become dormant for a very long time, it begins to degenerate until it becomes totally useless. The same can be applied to inspiration. When a writer is inspired to write but has formed the habit of procrastinating, a time will come when such a writer will no longer get inspiration. The more you utilize the inspiration you receive, the more the inspiration flows. It becomes just like a running tap.

 

• Procrastination robs you of growth

When you procrastinate, you don’t get to write. When you don’t write, you don’t get to become better in your writing. As such, you remain at a level for a very long time.

 

• Procrastination is laziness 

Laziness is the mother of procrastination. It is laziness that will prevent you from putting all your weight into churning out creativity through writing. But once you can overcome laziness, procrastination will meet its Waterloo.

 

Conclusion 

The world isn’t complete without your beautiful stories, articles and whatnot. So, to prevent procrastination from robbing you of your creativity, you need to deal it a final blow because it is the enemy of creativity.

 

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