In yesterday’s post about taking my inventory during my divorce, I mentioned that I have used procrastination to rob me of any clear victory from writing my blogs. Because I am retired with no pension, I have a need to make some income from my blogs. As I have reported before, although the count of blogs is at 80,000,000, only 200,000 to 500,000 bloggers make an income from their writing. That translates to about 2-6%—not a big crowd. Most bloggers make his/her income from ads whose income is dictated by the number of readers each blog has through various RSS readers (that orange button seen on most blogs).

I want to make my income from email counseling. I hope to be able to increase my readership from 30-60 daily to a much larger group. I plan to start a Twitter campaign in the next few weeks. Twitter is an amazing tool but the Twitter population is being inundated by spam Twitter users. As of today, it is estimated that 20%+ of users are created by spam software. I don’t use any accelerated software to increase my following because I can personally add or delete each new user based on what I find on his.her Twitter homepage. It is time-consuming. I also filter my followers through a program that deletes all people I follow who don’t follow me back. I am working on a plan to add free information about self-help or personal development in my Twits.

I read an article about procrastination written by Dr. Timothy Pychyl, Associate professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. He specializes in the study of procrastination. In the article he writes that the emotion most strongly associated with procrastination is guilt. Wow! I know that is what I have been doing when procrastination is seen as punishment. How could I allow this terrible person—me—to succeed? Surely, she deserves to live in the basement of rejection and torment. Believe me, I am been a master at denying myself much pleasure. No one else can punish us as severely as we punish ourselves.

So my 6th and 7th step work is beginning to be very successful. One of the procrastination tricks that I’ve found is my love of organizing. Although being logical gives me much clear direction in life, I’ve found that I duplicate many times over the same information in an effort to “organize” it. What it really does really is give me endless hours of activity with little progress. Procrastination is about spinning your own wheels.

Now that I know how I misuse my gift of organizing, it will be hard to continue that. Thank goodness—I can move on to helping others—my favorite activity in all the world.