Procrastination and MonkeyPost

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Image by Paul Sprengers from Pixabay

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I’ve decided to write a Piece about my titanic battle with procrastination so that other people can learn from it and also, for the digitally-able, have a good laugh at my complete lack of progress.

Currently I am procrastinating about something digital which is very complicated (to me). As usual, I’ve been reading stuff, magazines, old Sunday papers, to distract myself. I have managed to get on with it in the past with other things, though I do tend to crash to a halt against Teknika/the digital world which doesn’t just look alien and scary but also completely out of reach.

Now I’m not afraid of trying, I’m afraid of failing over and over again which makes me want to cry and scream. I’ve managed to stop screaming at my laptop (or hitting it) because as a wise man said to me once, I know I’m the Adult and the computer is the Toddler. Most of the time.

In other words, I’m afraid of my own emotions. Advice says, plan what you need to do. Even visualise yourself doing it and then do it. Eat the frog first (do the worst bit first).

Now then, what’s wrong with all this excellent advice? Well, it’s the fact that I don’t know exactly what to do and my experience tells me that if I plough ahead regardless, I wind up in a deep ditch full of muddy water with one of the oxen sitting on my foot.

I only worked this out this afternoon. I’m procrastinating because I don’t know how to do what I want to do. I’ve tried following instructions and I end up in a ditch again. I watch more Rilly Easy videos and can’t make head or tail of them, getting steadily more confused and angry. Rilly Easy videos are confusing because the children in them tend to use words that sound normal but mean weird computery stuff and they leave out large lumps of crucial explanations because they think everyone knows that and I don’t. They also boast about how Rilly Easy whatever they’re supposedly explaining is.

There used to be people called teachers who would explain things very simply and the best of them would try all sorts of different angles to get the thing into my head. However there are no proper teachers in Teknika.

So, of course, after a bit my reptile brain takes over and starts screaming ‘We’re all doomed!’ and ‘It’s a plot!’ and then runs away to read the Sunday papers again.

What am I trying to achieve? Well. (deep breath) I want to: (1) find a way of separating the people on my mailing list* who want to Beta-read** my latest book (NO MAN SO WISE) from the people who don’t;

(2) Then I need to somehow put the would-be Beta Readers onto a separate, smaller mailing list so I can send a pdf*** of NMSW to them and them alone.

And I know I’m doing the weird vocabulary thing but I can’t help it because it’s jargon. In Chaucer’s time, jargon was what birds twittered to each other. There are footnotes below for the digitally-innocent.

By the way, I’ve already tried twice and ended up completely bewildered.

Yes, I have a mail-list provider+. Let’s call it MonkeyPost to spare their blushes. I contacted their Support and had a pleasant Messaging chat with a help-person. We bonded over our love of cats.

He said I should do a survey and he would build it out (I haven’t found it yet.) And then I should do an Automation but I don’t understand why. Or, indeed, how. By that time on Friday it was past my bedtime so I thought that maybe I could do it in the morning when I wasn’t tired after a strenuous day of procrastination and a couple of hours of actual work.

And of course, ever since I’ve been procrastinating with all my might and have now read every single newspaper in the house apart from the recipe sections.

So this is my Plan. I will do one hour of watching Rilly Easy videos from MonkeyPost and see if I can work out anything of what they’re talking about. Then I will have a break and read a recipe section. Then I will contact MonkeyPost Support again with a list of phrases I need translated from jargon and then I might take another crack at it.

Yes, obviously, this Piece is a blatant example of procrastination, requiring a slight change of plan before I force myself to watch the Rilly Easy videos again.

Yes, I know.

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*mailing list – list of email addresses that you can email all at once but won’t trigger the spam police

**Beta-reader – somebody who very kindly reads a book before publication and then tells the author what they think.

***pdf – Portable Document Format or a document that you can send to someone but they can’t change it

+mail-list provider – a business that helps you send your email to all the addresses on your list and other things (for money)

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