I.
Procrastination was eating away at me. Literally. In one month, I had dropped around 10 pounds of mass I really couldn't afford to lose, and I was showing up to class clammy, overtired, and twitchy, sometimes in yesterday's clothes. I had developed muscle spasms from lack of sleep that pulled at my eyelids and rattled my quads, and, despite getting an average of 2-3 hours of sleep per night, and spending seemingly every waking moment working to catch up, I was still behind. Worse, I had resolved the previous semester to not let this happen again, and yet here I was, doing the exact same bullshit that had forced me to work for seventy-two hours straight the previous semester. What the fuck was wrong with me?
I have ADHD, but unfortunately for any pop-psychologists reading, this isn't one of those articles that starts and ends with "and then I got diagnosed with ADHD and got on meds and all my problems were solved!". Nope, sorry. I was diagnosed with ADHD and have been medicated since 2019 and I still acted this way. It definitely didn’t help that I have ADHD, but this went beyond that. So not only did I have this huge problem that was seemingly only going to get worse, I didn’t even know what exactly the problem was! Was my med dose wrong (unlikely, I had tried six different dosages and found my sweet spot ages ago)? Did I have some sort of brain tumor that made me procrastinate and not much else? Was I just a lazy fuck destined for nothing?
Well, it turns out, no, no, and no. I’m on the other side of this semester now, having Gotten My Shit Together in admirable fashion, and I’m here to share how I did it, what I learned, and how to apply this knowledge. I hope you find it useful.
II.
Most blocked creatives have an active addiction to anxiety. We prefer the low-grade pain and occasional heart-stopping panic attack to the drudgery of small and simple daily steps in the right direction. -Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is a curious book. It’s equal parts woo-y bullshit and amazing concrete advice, often intertwined so tightly that teasing through it to get to the good stuff can feel like trying to write a second book from the dissected carcass of the original. That being said, Cameron is often spot-on in her analysis of typical artistic maladies, and her exploration of procrastination was the first step on my journey to Get My Shit Together.
“Low grade pain and heart-stopping panic attack” was basically my life in January and February of 2025. I would accomplish nothing for weeks despite both desperately wanting to work and enjoying the work once I started. This was painful for me. I didn’t like being behind in my schoolwork, and I especially didn’t like being behind in the first semester of thesis. But there I was, addicted to anxiety, unable to work on things until the literal last minute.
This is sometimes referred to in ADHD circles and clinical psychology as “executive dysfunction” which is definitely a real thing, but in this context is a term I’m ambivalent towards. What I had seemed like more than that, at least experientially. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t do things, its that I was stuck in a pointless, debilitating anxiety spiral with no way out. I would try anything. So I decided, fuck it. Let’s see what this half-woo, half-good “Artist’s Way” has to offer.
The Artist’s Way has two commandments. One is an artist’s date, which I did try, but did not find that it helped with procrastination. The other is the morning pages. This is where my journey truly began.
I was not prepared for the pages. I am not a person who is easily shocked, and they shocked me. The morning pages are just three leafs of lined paper, written longhand in the morning, stream-of-consciousness style. Getting it all out. At first, my pages were drivel. Barely readable. Then, I began to use them as a place to meditate on the procrastination problems I was experiencing. One thing about the pages is that they force emotions out into the open. If you feel some type of way about something, it's going to come out one way or another.
The more I wrote, the more I began to notice my anxiety as it related to procrastination. But more than that, I began to notice that both anxiety and procrastination related to a third thing: big emotions. That is my crude term for it, but despite its childishness I prefer it to more clinical terms like “arousal” because the scale is in the name, and the scale is an important part of how emotions like this feel. Big emotions are all-encompassing, and on the edge of overwhelming. They can (and this is important) be positive or negative; a big emotion could be excitement, fear, happiness, dread, or any number of other feelings.
This turned out to be a huge piece of the puzzle. It’s easy, I think, for anyone to understand why someone would procrastinate on tasks that they don’t want to do (the “daily drudgery” of the equation). But what was curious about my situation was that I wanted to do the work! Loved it, even, when I finally got started! I just Couldn’t Start, or, rather, was avoiding the big emotions that came with starting work I cared about, and redirecting myself towards more low-stakes tasks that carried less emotional weight, or easy momentary distractions that could seem overwhelmingly important in the moment but in hindsight were tiny, insignificant things unworthy of their pull on my attention.
This was all well and good, but as I had already realized, awareness of an maladaptive pattern is not enough for me to actually change my behaviour. I need an actionable, some simple behavioral algorithm to apply when I get stuck, and which takes minimal amounts of brain-power to reference. One day, on the pages, it came to me, as I was mulling over the problem. A short, punchy phrase to make Cal Newport proud:
“Ignore the Snake, Ride the Dragon.”
III.
The phrase, despite sounding cool, is pretty useless without a little clarification (though astute readers may be able to guess at its meaning from context clues).
I’ll start with “Ignore the Snake”. This can function as a loose biblical allusion (and, if that resonates with you, I recommend thinking of it that way). However, the key part of the metaphor is really the size and movement pattern of the reptiles in question. “Snakes”, in this little aphorism, represent those small, momentary distractions I was talking about earlier. They can be quite alarming in the moment (like a real snake!) or even tempting (like its biblical counterpart), but ultimately they are tiny, slithering creatures that are not as powerful as they seem. Your job, as instructed, is to ignore them as they come up, or, if they can’t be completely ignored, redirect your attention away from them until you can fully address them. Snakes will try to convince you that they need to be dealt with now or never. Ignore that too.
This brings us to the next part of the metaphor: “Riding the Dragon”. Dragons are big emotions. The kind that inspire a bit of fear, a bit of awe, that you might shy away from feeling fully. They are often (but not always), largely positive emotions that haven’t been harnessed, and that we are (justifiably, I might add) a bit intimidated by. Caring deeply about a project you're passionate about is the best way to summon a dragon, therefore, it's not contradictory if the stuff you want to do the most is also the stuff you find the hardest to start. It actually comes with the territory. You’re staring down a dragon, which is fucking scary, and you might just have to ride it, which is even scarier.
It’s not just that. You also have to deal with snakes, who, compared to this dragon, suddenly seem like child’s play. This is where the endless task list of miscellaneous items starts to write itself: oh, i’ll just go to the store/to the gym/do the laundry/etc. etc.. And of course, these tasks need doing, but Not Right Now. Right now, you need to ride that fucking dragon.
It’s the worst the first time you do it. Tearing yourself away from distraction and redirecting towards your important project takes a lot of willpower, and may even provoke anxiety. Sometimes, it might be tempting to just pretend to work, instead of actually working. But once you finally do it, and allow yourself to lock in (as the kids say), it becomes that much easier the second time around. If you do it enough times, you become an experienced dragon rider, able to surf the updrafts and downdrafts of strong emotion with ease. This takes time and practice. I still have not perfected it, and I still get thrown off on occasion. But I can tell you that I have broken the panic cycle, and I have become, at the very least, a novice dragon-rider, getting better every day. Right now, that’s good enough for me.
IV.
Honestly though, those first couple dragon rides were rough. The difficulty of tearing myself away from tiny, flitting tasks was so immense that it’s actually quite embarrassing, in a way I’m sure many ADHD people can relate to. That feeling of broken-ness, of what the fuck is wrong with me, of oh, this really is a disability, isn’t it that made me want to retreat back to my panic spiral, back to my snakes. But I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did. I managed to get myself to the lab, despite my own excitement (now, that's a phrase!), and actually work on stuff. Instead of that low-grade pain, I got intensity.
It felt like going outside for the first time in three days. I would know. It felt like that harsh light hitting my face, too harsh at first, then faded as my eyes adjusted. It felt like the slight headache that faded into a heady joy, as I remembered how much I fucking love doing what I do. It felt like hell, then it felt like coming home.
V Coda
“Ignore the Snake, Ride the Dragon” is a helpful tool in one’s productivity arsenal. It has helped me out of a specific kind of rut, and I hope that it will help others as well. Snakes and dragons always go hand in hand, which is why the phrases are paired. If you are confronting a dragon, especially for the first time, expect snakes, and expect those snakes to be extra tempting and trickster-ish. For some people, their issues with procrastination have nothing to do with strong emotion, and everything to do with either honest-to-god executive dysfunction or the simple fact that they actually hate what they’re doing and want no part of it. This strategy would not be helpful to these cases, for what I assume are obvious reasons. However, these hypothetical people might still find it a useful tool to keep on their metaphorical belt, to deal with any dragons that come up in their future.