Friday feels like the right day to confess…
If procrastination were an Olympic sport, I’d be standing on the podium in full sweatsuit glory. My event? Software testing dread.
For days, I treated this task like it was a fire-breathing dragon waiting at the edge of my desk. I circled it. I sighed at it. I let my triple-booked, overstuffed calendar convince me I was “too busy” to engage with it.
And then, in a rare pocket of quiet last night, I finally cracked it open.
Reader: the dragon hissed once, then coughed up…a raccoon. A scrappy little nuisance rifling through my recycling bin, not a mythical beast plotting my downfall. Two hours in, I realized I’d already handled most of it. The only thing left? A few questions to clean up the corners.
So why do we do this to ourselves? Why does our brain sell us a horror movie when the actual footage is a raccoon stealing yesterday’s pizza box?
Here are my suspects this week:
-TRAINING THAT FEELS LIKE ELVISH RUNES: confusing, overcomplicated, and never quite how you would’ve built it. Hey, I’m an instructional designer at heart, I won’t be shamed for being judgmental about a learning experience (but I will admit to being a pain in the a$$).
-LIFE OUTSIDE THE SCREEN: distractions, transitions, personal curveballs… you know, the real energy drainers.
-THE “THREE JOB IN ONE” SYNDROME: when your role shapeshifts into multiple full-time gigs, you start rationing effort like its canned soup.
All true. But also? None of them changed the outcome: once I sat down, I could do the thing.
The professional development lens here is simple: stop granting squatter’s rights to dread. You already have the SKILLS. You’ve picked up more KNOWLEDGE than you give yourself credit for. The right ACTIVITIES, like blocking a sliver of time and just starting, flip the script. And yes, leaning on your NETWORK (Leah Collins, Chad Oswald) to gut-check or sanity-check along the way makes it lighter. And yes, again, SNAK sneaks in because I just can’t help myself.
My main point… dread is an overpaid consultant. It charges you double time before you’ve even opened the file. Fire it. And remember: the monsters in your head are often just raccoons in your inbox, wearing tiny capes and making dramatic beeping noises.
Alright, your turn—what’s the dragon in you’re head that’s really just a raccoon in a recycling bin?
